Month: January 2016

Our sympathy for fictitious characters can translate into compassion in real life

There was a lovely piece of writing in the Guardian recently about how reading both inspires empathy and connects people. This is not a new revelation for those who have participated in the Salon studies or other book studies. There is a wonderful connectivity that occurs in the presence of great ideas and complex language.

Overall, we need to find new ways to connect across political divisions & differences in world view– across gender divides and national perspectives. Literature offers this opportunity. Every week in the Salon conversations I witness how we learn to respect differing approaches– and use these to enrich our own particular world view.

Here is a selection from this article– I think you would enjoy the whole piece: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jan/17/a-literary-cure-for-loneliness-pick-up-a-book

But there is another important reason why everyone should read more books, and in particular fiction. The responsibility to combat loneliness lies with those who do not suffer from it. Lonely people often feel that there is no one out there, no one who understands them or can share their point of view. They need to know that actually there are. That requires everybody else to make the imaginative leap of feeling that connection, and reading fiction helps. It makes people more empathic – sympathy for fictitious characters can translate into compassion in real life.

The stories of strangers reach us through many means: news bulletins, interviews, biography and memoir, but also drama and fiction. Listening to these carefully, making imaginative connections, walking a mile in their shoes might help turn some of those strangers into real friends.

I always expect more from the New Years’ moment. We invest so much into this idea of the change of the year– that there will be an overturning– a renewal commiserate with the birth of the New Year. When I making plans towards the coming year in December– it just seems impossible– this distance from one year to another– that the holidays will come through with their whirring and sparkle and then slink out –and suddenly its January. I can hardly crack open the new calendar– those fresh pages in an unknown year seem impossible. There should be a kind of metallic grinding as the old gears give in to new or a new spirit of animation replaces the exhausted, dusty old.

Perhaps it doesn’t just happen, I think. The idea of New Years’ resolutions– those claims towards renewal, the commitment to change–are the means we have to turn this organic sense of change into something recognisable. Swimming in Proust means that I am constantly overturning ideas about time: how fragile is our understanding of time’s movement and our shaping within time, and how deeply we struggle to hold time and make the passing days in some way accountable in our scale of meaning.
That is one view of the past days: another, as fitfully captured in the picture above, is the stance towards passing days that focuses on those startling moments: when the moon bursts into the gloaming on a Christmas Eve walk; when dear friends turn up for a brief moment from miles and years away and the conversation yields remarkable insights; when a simple shared meal- a night like any other– suddenly becomes a galvanising moment– a treasure of solidity and laughter. These are the glimmers that light and lighten the way through time– and those moments also that we do not celebrate– those moments that carve us sharper as we meet and move through the tangled forests of the world– all of these become what we are. The passing of the old year into the new gives room for a recognition of how all these become a life.

This poem is a Solstice favourite; connection to the musings above? Perhaps– or just let it sing to you:

Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,
what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.
In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.
And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

From Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29 by Rainer Maria Rilke