![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/84\/2013\/12\/vanya15f-1-web.jpg\" "\\"vanya15f-1-web\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\nIn Laura Miller\u2019s quasi-memoir The Magician\u2019s Book: A Skeptic\u2019s Adventures in Narnia<\/em><\/a>, she talks about her intellectual development in the context of the books she read as a child, with a particular emphasis on Narnia. \u00a0But my attention was caught by a later passage, after she\u2019s read Orwell\u2019s\u00a0Animal Farm<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t mean to suggest that Animal Farm<\/em> isn\u2019t moving. Even as an adult, I found the novel terribly sad. I pitied poor Boxer the draft horse, who dies serving a regime he can\u2019t even see has betrayed him. I pitied him so much that I almost wept. But pity always contains a seed of superiority and therefore contempt. We pity those we regard as less than ourselves: animals or simpletons. As maddening as Lear and Hamlet can be, I don\u2019t pity them. I\u2019m too smart to make Boxer\u2019s mistake, but Shakespeare\u2019s tragic heroes err in ways that I can all too uncomfortably imagine myself succumbing to myself (if not in so grand a manner).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It\u2019s a far cry from the lyric in\u00a0<\/a>Passion<\/a>,<\/em> \u201cHow quickly pity leads to love.\u201d \u00a0Miller doesn\u2019t explain exactly what kind of fearful fellow feeling she experiences when she thinks of Lear and Hamlet, or how its character differs from that of pity.<\/p>\n I think of pity as the recognition of someone else\u2019s pain mixed with sorrow that they are experiencing it. \u00a0There\u2019s some kind of power dynamic, in that pity presupposes I have the emotional resources to feel someone else\u2019s pain, meaning I can\u2019t be already swamped with my own, but that kind of difference is transient. \u00a0I may not be able to offer you pity for your jammed finger when I\u2019m doubled over with food poisoning, but your strength in that moment, as you offer it to me, doesn\u2019t mean I am always cast as your inferior.<\/p>\n I was slightly grumpy and scornful about Miller\u2019s take on pity until a few weeks later, when I saw (and did not enjoy)\u00a0Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike<\/em>, Christopher Durang\u2019s comedy riffing on Chekov. \u00a0I was complaining about the passive characters to a friend on the phone, who replied, \u201cWell, you have no empathy for people who don\u2019t make choices, Leah.\u201d<\/p>\n While Miller found that her pity carried a whiff of contempt, my contempt completely screened off any hint of pity. \u00a0Durang must have come close to the aesthetics of Chekov, because during his play, \u00a0I had the same reaction I did to The Three Sisters<\/em> and\u00a0The Seagull<\/em>: a fierce desire to shake all the characters, hard. \u00a0And a profound gratitude that they were fictional, because it would be horrible if these people actually existed. \u00a0(So much for Chekov increasing empathy, per this study<\/a>).<\/p>\n But Miller and I might both benefit from the same solution. \u00a0Sometimes, when I\u2019m struggling with empathy, I try to abstract the problem a character or a friend is having. \u00a0Boxer is specifically having a problem with being unable to recognize betrayal, but, up a few levels of abstraction, I might say that something about the way he is right now is making it hard for him to exist in the world as it is or to avoid causing harm to others. \u00a0I end up in similar bottlenecks, though my difficulty is never too much trust.<\/p>\n My empathy or Miller\u2019s feeling of equality ultimately doesn\u2019t need to be rooted in sharing a particular flaw, but in sharing the experience of being flawed in any way. \u00a0There\u2019s no hierarchy of tragic flaws that puts my callousness above Vanya\u2019s placidity or Boxer\u2019s gullibility. \u00a0Each of us might pray to be delivered from the defect that makes it harder for us to do good and avoid doing harm.<\/p>\n Sometimes, I like to crib from the way one of my friends talks to her infant daughter. \u00a0When she squalls and cries, sometimes for ridiculous-seeming reasons, my friend murmurs \u201cYes, it\u2019s\u00a0hard<\/em> to be a baby.\u201d \u00a0Even when a child is crying because, say, \u201cI wouldn\u2019t open the door she was blocking with her foot\u201d<\/a>\u00a0there\u2019s something that\u2019s quite hard about wanting the door to open and having no idea, in your heart-felt need and limited understanding of physics, why someone can\u2019t do this simple thing for you.<\/p>\n I may not manage something that obviously silly, but I\u2019m sure I\u2019ve asked for help while simultaneously fending off solutions because I was too upset to recognize them or was afraid of feeling weak. \u00a0The baby and I are both in a pitiable state, she because she can\u2019t master physics, me because I can\u2019t master pride. \u00a0There\u2019s enough commonality in the experience of being overwhelmed for there to be empathy.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I\u2019m on day three of\u00a0a novena to St. Isidore<\/a>,\u00a0my saint for the month<\/a>, and readers are welcome to join in.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In Laura Miller\u2019s quasi-memoir The Magician\u2019s Book: A Skeptic\u2019s Adventures in Narnia, she talks about her intellectual development in the context of the books she read as a child, with a particular emphasis on Narnia. \u00a0But my attention was caught by a later passage, after she\u2019s read Orwell\u2019s\u00a0Animal Farm. I don\u2019t mean to suggest that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":127,"featured_media":8395,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-morality-in-practice","category-reviewsrecommendations"],"yoast_head":"\n