“I have always felt that a man can only be saved by another man,” remarked James Baldwin as he gave his way of life an hour of despair. “I know we don't always save each other. But I also know we save each other sometimes.”
If we save each other, there is always some version of the strongest thread of life that we humans can weave: compassion – the best adaptation we have to our existing heritage as “fragile species.”
Like all spiritual guides, compassion is a story we tell ourselves – about each other, about the world, about our place in it and our power in it. Like all stories told, the power of our compassion reflects the power and sensitivity of our storytelling.
That's why the Polish psychologist turned poet and novelist Olga Tokarczuk he explores in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
Tokarczuk recounts a moment from her childhood that touched her deeply: Her mother, paraphrasing Montaigne's view that “to say that we will not be alive a hundred years from now, is as foolish as regretting that we were not there a hundred years ago,” told her young daughter that she missed her even before she was born—a wonderful gesture of romantic time. Inside the abyss of a lifetime, next to the arrow of time that finally shot through his mother's life, Tokarczuk reflects:
A young woman who had never been religious – my mother – gave me something that was once known as a soul, thus giving me the best narrator in the world.
Our current bond, Tokarczuk notes, is that the old narrative about who we are and how the world works is thin and clearly broken, but we'll find a new one to take its place. Noting that in our cosmogony “the world is made of words” yet “we have no language, no vision, no metaphors, no new myths and legends,” he laments the artificial tyranny that has replaced them:
We live in the reality of a first-person polyphonic narrative, and are met on all sides by polyphonic sound. What I mean by first person is the kind of fiction that revolves around the narrator who is writing about himself and herself. We have decided that this kind of individual view, this voice from the person himself, is natural, humane and honest, even if it avoids a wider perspective. The account of the first person, so conceived, weaves a completely different pattern, the only one of its kind; it is to have a sense of autonomy as an individual, to know yourself and your destiny. Yet it also means creating an opposition between the self and the world, and that opposition can be divisive at times.
These ideas of the self, how man becomes the “submissive center of the world,” are the defining feature of this latest chapter in the history of our species. Yet everything around us reveals its deceptive nature, for as the great naturalist John Muir observed, “when we try to pick out anything in itself, we find it connected to everything else in the universe.”
In view of his lifelong fascination with “systems of interconnectedness and influences that we usually do not know, but which we discover by chance, like a surprising and surprising convergence or a fateful convergence, all those bridges, nuts, bolts, welded joints and connectors” – the title of his friend Nobel laureate Szymbolka Szymborska Slovaław Szymborsaw Wissław Tokarczuk shows our intelligence not as a separate and invisible intelligence but as part of the living universe:
We are all humans, plants, animals, and things – immersed in a single universe, governed by the laws of physics. This common space has its own structure, and within it the laws of physics record an infinite number of continuously interconnected forms. Our cardiovascular system is like a river system, the structure of a leaf is like the human transportation system, the movement of the galaxies is like the swirling of the water that flows in our bathtubs. Communities grow in the same way as bacterial colonies. The micro and macro scale show an infinite system of similarities.
Our speech, thinking and creation is not something invisible, removed from the world, but a continuation on another level of its endless processes of change.
We cross this wonderful divide whenever we enter what he calls a “personal prison of communication” – something that is amplified by all the compulsive sharing in so-called social media with their basic paradigm of impersonation. Instead, he invites us to look “beyond” and think about a different story – tasked with “revealing a wide range of facts and showing connections.” In the midst of a world beset by “many incompatible or openly hostile, counter-narratives,” fueled by techno-capitalist media systems that prey on the gravest dangers of human nature, Tokarczuk reminds us that literature is also an important tool for empathy — a baseless sweater for “powerful” media:
Literature is one of the few fields that try to keep us close to the hard truths of the world, because by its nature it is always psychological, because it focuses on the inner thoughts and motives of the characters, it reveals their experiences that are not easily accessible to another person, or it simply provokes the reader in the psychological explanation of their behavior. Only books can allow us to enter deeply into the life of another creature, understand its reasons, share its feelings and feel its fate.
You want something more than compassion, something that is sadly lacking in our cruel culture of dueling gotchas – a book of charity:
Gentleness is the art of impersonating, sharing feelings, and thus finding lasting reciprocity. Creating stories always means bringing things to life, giving life to all the small pieces of the world represented by human experience, the conditions people endure and their memories. Compassion personalizes everything related to it, making it possible to give it voice, to give it space and time to exist, and to be expressed.
Echoing Iris Murdoch's memorable definition of love as “the hardest realization that something outside of you is real,” Tokarczuk adds:
Compassion is the most respectful form of love. It's the kind of love that doesn't appear in the scriptures or the gospels, no one swears by it, no one quotes it. It has no special emblems or symbols, and does not lead to crime, or to quick envy.
It appears whenever we look closely and carefully at another being, at something that is not our “self”.
Gentleness is automatic and careless; it goes beyond sympathy. Rather it is a normal sharing of fate, though perhaps a little annoying. Compassion is a deep emotional concern for another being, its weakness, its unique nature, and its lack of immunity from suffering and the effects of time. Gentleness recognizes the bonds that connect us, the likeness and similarity between us. It is a way of looking at the world as living, alive, interconnected, cooperative, and dependent on itself.
Books are built on compassion for anyone but us.
Train Ursula K. Le Guin on storytelling as a liberating force, then revisit Toni Morrison's classic Nobel Prize acceptance speech on the power of language.
