Personal essays
Creating the space that we all need
You can skip this
When I was an editor, my number one trick for making a book or article better was to convince the author to eliminate the first couple of paragraphs. Sometime I suggested they eliminate entire sections or chapters.
“You had to write this,” I would tell them, “to understand the story you were preparing to tell. But your reader doesn’t need to read this.”
They just want to begin.
Unfortunately, for you, these weekly pieces are unedited and I don’t throw away the parts I write just to understand what it is I’m trying to say.
Partly, that’s what an essay does - it’s an attempt to understand something and how we feel about that thing and what we want to say about that thing.
I have so many things that swirl around in my head as I sit down to write and I am often surprised by what comes out and in which order.
For instance, I didn’t intend to tell you any of this.
Reactions
I was going to write about an article that Chris recently sent me with a transcript of a speech that Charlie Jane Anders gave on receiving the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation award for Imagination in the Service of Society.
I read it and let it stew. I wasn’t ready to talk about it and still would rather you read it than have me say too much but something happened in the last couple of days that caused this line to reach out of my subconscious and send me back to read it again. It’s about the connection between imagination and empathy.
“People who refuse to do the hard work of empathizing with others — and I do believe this is a choice — also tend to have stunted imaginations.”
There’s so much there. Empathy requires hard work. We need to choose to do that work. Those who don’t do that work tend to have stunted imaginations.
I thought about that when I read the president’s response to the shooting and killing of students at Brown University.
“Stuff happens.”
When I heard bout the sad double murder of Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner, I thought about the movies he made. I thought about the wonderful interviews I’ve heard with him over the years. I thought about all of the people who knew the two of them who profoundly feel the loss.
I remembered the last thing that Carl Reiner every filmed just days before he died. It was a reenactment of the final scene of “The Princess Bride” with Carl as the grandfather and Rob as the kid. The scene made me cry then. It makes me cry now.
Not our president. He reacted to news of the double murder by making it about himself.
No empathy. No imagination.
The work
I spend a lot of time thinking about and working on my imagination.
It never occurred to me that I also spend a fair amount of time pausing to feel what others are feeling.
That’s all empathy means. It’s not sympathy it’s not judgement. It’s not agreement or dismissal. It’s just understanding what someone else feels and imagining what that’s like.
In movies sometimes we see something happen on the screen and the director cuts away to a reaction shot so that we can also see the action through the eyes of one or more characters.
It helps us feel what they’re feeling.
In her book, Charlie explains that she “wrote a book about how to use creative writing to make it through tough times, called Never Say You Can’t Survive, which is explicitly about using your imagination to stay positive when things are hard.”
It’s so difficult when things are hard. We see all of the things that are wrong in the world and all of the people who have so much more power than us. What can we possible do?
That, she argues, is the power of imagination. If you spend your time imagining hierarchies and control, you are “trapped in endless copies of someone else’s vision”.
I worry when I lose myself in my imagination or in a book or a movie, that I’m retreating from the world. I worry that I’m not doing what needs to be done.
We need that time away.
Charlie reminded me that “your private, cloistered reveries turn out to be one of the best ways to create that shared, inclusive space that can shelter other people. And the act of telling and consuming stories is how we imagine together, how our imaginations intertwine to spawn something bigger that can touch the outside world.”
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 299. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe