The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit
The Book in Three Sentences
“Difficulty is always a school, though learning is optional.” Empathy means that you travel out of yourself a little or expand: you can be a thousand miles from the person next to you in bed or deeply invested in the survival of a stranger on the other side of the world. Chronic pain can be treatable by training people to experience it differently, but the sufferer has to be willing to give up their story, a familiar version of themselves.
Notes on the Book
This book dives deep into Rebecca Solnit’s personal life and how she navigates her mother’s alzheimer's disease and declining health. My note’s for this book are generalized and do not reflect the breadth of the book.
Measuring Distance
“If the boundaries of the self are defined by what we feel, then those who cannot feel even for themselves shrink within their own boundaries, while those who feel for others are enlarged, and those who feel compassion for all beings must be boundless.” (p107)
We’re close, we say, to mean that we’re emotionally connected, that we are not separate; or, we’ve become distant, to describe the opposite. After years in New York City, Georgia O’Keeffe moved to rural New Mexico, from which she would sign her letters to the people she loved, ‘from the faraway nearby.’ It was a way to measure distance physical and psychic geography together. Emotion has its geography, affection is what is nearby, within the boundaries of the self. You can be a thousand miles from the person next to you in bed or deeply invested in the survival of a stranger on the other side of the world. (p108)
Empathy
Empathy means that you travel out of yourself a little or expand. It’s really recognizing the reality of another’s existence that constitutes the imaginative leap that is the birth of empathy, a word invented by a psychologist interested in visual art (Edward Titchener). The root word is path, from the Greek word for passion or suffering, from which we also derive pathos and pathology and sympathy. It’s a coincidence that empathy is build from a homonym for the Old English path, as in a trail. Empathy is a journey you travel, if you pay attention, if you care, if you desire to do so. (pp194–195)
Learning to Listen
Fairy tales are about trouble, about getting in and out of it, and trouble seems to be a necessary stage on the route of becoming. “Difficulty is always a school, though learning is optional.” (pp13–14)
A physical therapist told me that chronic pain is treatable, sometimes by training people to experience it differently, but the sufferer ‘has to be willing to give up their story.’ Some people love their story that much even if it’s of their own misery, even if it ties them to unhappiness, or they don’t know how to stop telling it. Maybe it’s about loving coherence more than comfort, but it might also be about fear—you have to die a little to be reborn, and death comes first, the death of a story, a familiar version of yourself. (pp241–242)
Other Thoughts
Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone. (pp60–61)
“Never turn down an adventure without a good reason.” (p74)