When I was in elementary school, teachers would commonly assign to the class the task of writing a piece of fiction—a “composition”—with the advice “Write what you know.” This directive always gave me a sinking feeling, as if the teacher were attaching concrete blocks to my imagination. “What do I know?” I’d think. “I’m nine years old!” Leaving aside the fact that a writer’s point of view is pretty much forged by the age of five, and the templates for most of experience are cut by the time one is nine, I was not in a position, at that tender age, to mine my own experience and shape it in a way that might speak to others. What I understood from the teacher was that she or he was advising a concrete, literal approach: “Write about what you did on your summer vacation.”
While, as a much younger person, I didn’t know what I knew, I did know what I could imagine, and I had no trouble authorizing myself to travel infinite distances from the concrete “known.” I didn’t have the words to describe it, but I know now that metaphor—with all its bright trappings of myth, fairy tale and fable—was my native clime, the universe in which I felt at home; and of course my stories about headless horsemen, nine-year-old spies and daring rescues at knifepoint said far more about the concrete facts of my life than any forensic description could have. As I matured as a writer, my stories became more and more rooted in the “here and now.” I didn’t need such elaborate masks to convey my meanings and I strove for a deceptive realism: a layer of what looks like solid ground that, in fact, is afloat on a sea of metaphor—the inverse of magic realism. In a sense, I started way outside of the “small circle” and worked my way back in. Or perhaps I dove down, spiralling into the centre of it, toward the vanishing point that suddenly opens up, like a wormhole, onto a strange new world.
How can we know what we don’t know? What is it like to be someone else? Does cinammon taste the same to you as it does to me? When I see a round red fruit and call it an apple, are you seeing the same shape and colour? As a child, these were the questions that took my mind out to wander during long sermons at Sunday mass (along with fantasies of rappelling with rope and harness up the inside walls of the church) or at bedtime just after the lights went out, when thoughts of infinity (more circles) made me feel carsick. And in adolescence: how big are our individual circles? Are we doomed to be utterly alone in them? My skull is a circle: the ultimate prison. (See June Callwood’s piece for a wise antidote to adoloescent angst.) Now I take solace in a paradox: each of us is indeed alone, and it’s our awareness of this, along with our ability to empathize with the isolation of others, that allows us to become less so. Empathy is the raw material of compassion. Compassion is an act of imagination; a leap of faith into another’s closed circle.
This ability to extrapolate from one’s own limited experience to that of many unrelated others is a type of magic, no less than the transformation of a scarf into a bouquet of flowers. Compassion is the power to transform the base metal of mundane experience into a kind of universal gold, recognizable—valuable—to all; compassion is the ability to see deeply enough into our own souls and memories that we glimpse a kind of prima materia, that elusive substance sought by alchemists, physicists and mystics from which all matter—including all life—is formed; that irreducible stuff or force (noun or verb) that we share with the merest particle in the farthest reaches of the universe. Surely we are all working with the same basic materials even when it comes to those carbon-based emanations we call thoughts and feelings. This means that, across great gulfs of time, experience, class, culture and gender, and more, we not only can, but must imagine ourselves into one another’s points of view. Not because “to understand all is to pardon all.” But because without understanding there can be no “fellow feeling,” which is what compassion is. And without compassion there can be no wisdom. No peace. Compassion implies humility. What could be humbler than the act of listening, of placing one’s imagination at the service of another’s point of view; even if on occasion we conclude that we must fight what we have heard and seen, or abandon someone we have put our heart and soul into understanding.
In this book there are grab bags stuffed with toothsome pearls of wisdom; there are cautionary tales by turns humorous and harrowing; there are finely distilled stories of loss and letting go, of redemption through contact with unlikely others (including and, at times especially, other animals); there are accounts of the struggle to balance personal fulfillment with the needs of others, of the mortal combat that precedes forgiveness. Epiphanies are shared in the bracing and irreverent tones of a kitchen-table conversation, and mundane moments are lit with lyricism such that the familiar is revealed as fleeting, and terribly precious. And there are striking contradictions. A piece by a mother of sons mourning the absence of daughters sits cheek by jowl with a daughter’s account of the painful necessity of cutting her mother out of her life. Most of the pieces, however, inhabit the border zones: those uncertain territories where peace and strife are in constant negotiation.
The writers themselves are a diverse group: journalists, authors, athletes, homemakers, teachers, artists, office workers and entertainers, many of whom combine several of the above. Some inhabit very large social and professional circles, others trace a shorter radius of home and family, but these differences are, I believe, far from definitive when it comes to a highly evolved world view: the Brontës and Emily Dickinson are evidence of that, just as an adventurer like Jane Goodall makes of her journey, far from human culture, an illumination of what connects us most intimately. And, indeed, this book is concerned with relationships—personal, political, environmental. Some of the pieces are funny, others are angry, many are both; some are poetic, others are barbed with satire. All are earnest, even the ironic ones. Each writer has done her utmost to share a scrap of wisdom—something torn from experience and saved against the day when it will find its place in the quilt—along with her doubts, in a way that is unmediated by ego or apology (that false humility which is really a disguise for fear). At the centre of this collection is each writer’s struggle to articulate a unique point of view in such a way that it can be launched like a message in a bottle to innumerable other “islands;” or, more aptly, to cause a ripple that dilates and intersects with other circles until the circles disappear and we are left with something that resembles more of a web: interdependent, inextricable. The result is thirty-five acts of compassion and little leaps of faith.
In this book, confidences are shared that might not even be whispered otherwise, certainly not to a stranger in a bookstore. But the page is different. When I write fiction, I imagine that I am speaking to one person: I can’t see the face, which is indistinct in any case, hovering just outside my peripheral vision; but I am aware of a benevolently inclined stranger, a tender ghost, politely yet eagerly haunting my left shoulder, trying for a glimpse of the page. I have compassion for this hopeful ghost. She or he is craving something true, something nourishing. Reading is among the few truly private and intimate acts left to us. As such, it has the paradoxical power to bring us closer to one another than any of our high-tech amenities. This book assumes complicity and understanding. It assumes imagination in its highest form: compassion. This book makes of the reader, a friend.