Hate is taught – it is learned. The implication being that human nature is inherently good and just. However, around the world it seems hate is taught and internalized. In the same sense, compassion can be cultivated; tended to like a garden spreading its roots further and growing stronger. One must have access to the right materials to cultivate a garden. Literature, long known to develop empathy through its unique ability to allow readers to experience lives so different from their own, can be one of those tools. Without further diversion, here are my book recommendations to cultivate your garden of compassion. They range from books of those under dictatorial rule to books having compassion for our earth and everything on it.
The most recently published book on this list is Everything is Tuberculosis by famed author of The Fault in Our Stars, and other well loved young adult fiction novels, John Green. In his second non-fiction book Everything is Tuberculosis, Green explores how the disease has shaped much of our society to have the contours known today, such as feminine beauty trends to the U.S. State of New Mexico gaining independence due to high tuberculosis populations. With expert hands, Green threads together the history of the disease and his own experience meeting a 17 year old boy, Henry, from Sierra Leone who has a tuberculosis diagnosis. Central to the book is how tuberculosis is a disease of inequality that through its propagation further forges inequality. Disease is a taboo topic in the modern world, especially diseases like Tuberculosis that are now ‘curable’ with modern medicine. Green brings attention to both the structural changes and personal changes necessary to lessen the impact of this disease.
Another book that discusses a topic frequently swept under the rug – only discussed in whispers is Chanel Miller’s Know My Name. Her memoir details her experience surviving a sexual assault on the Standford University campus and the aftermath. With beautiful prose Miller accounts the many ways in which society still views sexual assault as the victims fault. Empathy and compassion are often on the side of the perpetrator, leaving Miller with only minimal support from those who believe her. Know My Name depicts Miller in her wholeness, yes as an assault survivor, but also as a superb author, a daughter, a sister, a friend, as someone who refuses to be solely defined by one night. She reveals the ways in which the relations to survivors can do better to support them, what offers them strength to grow and heal and again demonstrates the structural changes that are necessary as well. Miller offers the words to draw these difficult conversations out of the dark corners we often ignore.
Growing up surrounded on all sides by the natural world, the forest in my backyard and ocean water buoying my body in the summer months, I naturally gravitated towards an eco-conscious lifestyle. Of course there are the basic eco-friendly tips the majority of people now live by such as separating the recycling or turning off the lights after leaving a room. Owing to the fact that most individual actions that benefit the earth require effort, something incompatible with a society obsessed with comfort and ease, those actions are not mainstream. I picked The World Ending Fire by Wendell Berry off the shelf in Powell’s bookstore on a random Tuesday. By the next Sunday, after turning the last page, I elected to make several lifestyle changes. In his essays Berry delivers dedication after dedication to the land that raised him. The beauty of this essay collection is its ability to change the readers’ relationship to the land walked over every day and take on a new appreciation for it. He clarifies the actions that anyone can take to prevent his dedications to the land from turning into eulogies.
A complementary reading to The World Ending Fire, and a wonderful introduction to eco-conscious reading, is Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. Kimmerer is an environmentalist, professor and Native American dedicated to restoring human relationships with the land. In her collection of essays she locates readers specifically in America and Native American knowledge, but the actions she shares are applicable around the world. Kimmerer understands the power of a well told story and utilizes this in Braiding Sweetgrass to tug on readers’ empathy and compassion for the world around them. Like The World Ending Fire after reading I found myself looking at the trees I pass by everyday on my walk home with new eyes and a new appreciation.
While many work to repair the world we live in there will always be those attempting to destroy it. It seems every time I turn on the news the headlines are of war and dictators winning against democracy. As my own country falls into the hands of a dictator, literature serves as a guide to see how times of extreme political turmoil have been survived in the past. The memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi, recounts Nafisi’s time living in post-revolution Iran teaching a group of women English literature, an action forbidden on account of their femaleness and also the western aspect of the literature. A majority of the rhetoric around Iran portrayed in western media focused on the oppression, the evilness of the government, but it never humanized the citizens living under that oppression; it never placed value on their lives. Reading Lolita in Tehran tells the story of dissent in the face of oppression that the west does not want to tell.
My final recommendation for cultivating compassion is Regarding the Suffering of Others by Susan Sontag. Originally published in 2003, her final book before her death in 2004, it is a collection of essays observing the way in which we witness the suffering of others in the modern western world. She dissects the distance at which views hold themselves from suffering shown on tv and social media. Her commentary has only become more relevant and insightful the more entrenched the act of viewing becomes in the modern world. Sontag articulates the ways in which witnessing suffering can open us up to empathy instead of disassociating from it.
While there are millions of books both fiction and non-fiction that can accomplish the task of further developing compassion, these are a few of the recent ones I have read that feel relevant to current events in the world.
Words by Sofia Cain
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