Just Far Enough Away

The place where sympathy is most easily mistaken is that it looks like the disappearance of distance. We say we are moved, say we understand another person’s pain, as if once feeling occurs, one layer between two people has been removed. But I increasingly suspect that much sympathy is established precisely through distance. If pain rushed at us in its original form, a person might only step back; only after it has been refracted once through a stage, a page, a lens, or an institution does it become something one can stay with.

So the question is not whether people should sympathize. Without sympathy, the world would be harder. The question is: when we are finally able to feel for others, who has arranged that “ability” for us? Whom does it protect, and whom does it leave where they are?

A copy of National Geographic spread across one’s lap once brought the faraway into American living rooms. In the early twentieth century, photographs increasingly occupied the magazine’s pages, and lands newly incorporated into the nation’s field of vision were bound into household knowledge. Readers did not need to leave the sofa to turn the world onto their own legs. Paper pressed against trouser cloth, its corners slightly curled by a thumb, captions beneath the photographs arranging names for unfamiliar things. Outside the window were still familiar streets; the distant places inside the pages were quiet, as if they had already consented to being viewed.

This is not indifference. And precisely because it is not indifference, it is difficult to handle. A photograph might genuinely open a person’s curiosity, making him realize for the first time that there is a larger world beyond his own doorstep. But the page’s gentleness is also its power. It makes the faraway clear, and also keeps it flat. Once a place has been seen, it is quickly placed into the order of “how we understand the world.” Distance has not disappeared; it has simply been printed so naturally that it resembles intimacy.

When Fiordiligi stands onstage, another kind of distance is taking place. She sings a passage of self-reproach almost too soft to bear, about to betray a promise she had thought could not be betrayed, her voice seeming to kneel ahead of her, asking forgiveness before anything has yet happened. The audience sits in the dark, their bodies held by the backs of their seats, their hands resting steadily on their laps. They are very close to her, close enough to hear how shame trembles inside the melody; and very far from her, far enough that no one needs to bear the consequences for her.

Mozart does not allow this staying-with to remain clean. Behind the aria, two horns suddenly enter. The signal was not subtle at the time: the cuckolded husband, comic mockery, a coarse little laugh beside vows of love. The melody pulls us toward someone who is failing, and the horns push us back into our seats. We pity her, and also judge her; we are moved by her, and also reminded that our being moved is not innocent.

When Adam Smith wrote about sympathy, he said that a person places himself through imagination into another’s situation, as if entering his body. But what we truly feel is only a weaker version. This weakness is not merely a defect. Without it, another person’s pain might be nothing but a fire one cannot reach into. People need this copy so they will not be driven back by the original pain’s burn. The real danger is that people often forget it is only a copy.

To call distance, in every case, hypocrisy would also be too quick. Without form, pain is not necessarily more real; it may also be reduced to coercion. Once people are required to press too close, they often do not understand others better, but hurry to end their own discomfort, finding for the other person a meaning that lets the bystander feel at ease. So-called directness is sometimes only another form of possession.

The audience sits in its seats not always in order to consume another’s pain safely. Sometimes the seat is a discipline: I cannot rush onto the stage to rewrite her fate, cannot mistake my own tears for her body, and cannot, just because I cannot bear it, demand that the story immediately give me a clean exit. Here the chair back is not only comfort; it also holds a person back. Good distance is not indifference, but knowing that one cannot cross the line.

The Meatseller places this distance in an even more difficult position. Selinna Ajamikoko is a young Nigerian woman who dreams of becoming a meat seller like her mother, and therefore sets off on the road to Italy. If such an experience is pushed directly before an audience’s eyes, it can easily become a display of trauma; if it is handled too beautifully, aesthetics will glaze over the pain. Director Margherita Giusti says the greatest challenge of animated documentary is not to let aesthetics overpower the narrative, but to let Selinna’s voice stand in front.

This sentence could almost serve as the baseline for media of sympathy. Distance here is not meant to let the audience comfortably possess pain, but to let the teller still possess her own voice. Animation should not wipe the audience’s tears for them, nor should it render the wound more beautiful. It is more like a curtain that must remain light and thin: one can see the figure behind the curtain, but will not mistake the curtain for the person; one can stay before the story, but cannot use one’s staying to cover over the person who is speaking.

The same distance, when it reaches the border, becomes harder. It is not only hidden in theater seats and magazine pages; it can also be built into dipping stations and waiting periods. Lines on a map mean nothing to ticks, cattle, or fruit flies. A tick will not stop in front of a border sign, and a cow will not change its hunger or its steps because of a line. Life’s movement was always part of the landscape. But once a border is placed into dynamic land as a static object, movement is renamed as risk.

After a cow crosses the line, it has not only changed location; it may also have changed names. It must be quarantined, must enter a dipping station, must wait sixty days. Water, chemical solution, fences, and forms work together, writing a line from the map into the animal’s body. The boundary is no longer only ink on a map; it becomes the medicinal smell on hair, breathing behind rails, a waiting period ticked in some box on a form. Ranchers say their cattle are American cattle, not Mexican tick-infested cows. In this way, the national border descends onto hair and parasites. This is no longer a question of sympathy, but the governance version of safe distance: an unbearable adjacency is broken into procedures; life that cannot stop is forced through a system of naming.

But I do not want to write all these procedures as conspiracy. Ticks spread disease, fruit flies destroy orchards, and quarantine sometimes really is protecting bodies and land. To see the dipping station only as violence would instead seem too light, as if risk were merely imagined. The more troublesome point is here: real risk does not automatically make classification innocent. The chemical solution may be necessary, and the name still has power; the waiting period may be effective, and the people and animals waiting are still placed in unequal positions. Safety is not a lie; safety is simply never pure.

At this point, being just far enough away reveals two faces. It can protect the teller, so that she is not swallowed by the audience’s urgency; it can also protect the viewer, allowing him to fold the world into specimens on a page. The so-called “just enough” is not a stable position, but a relation that may slide at any moment. Chair backs and dipping stations both manufacture distance, only one reminds people not to cross the line, while the other rewrites adjacent lives as risk.

That I feel your pain does not mean I possess your pain. That I am moved by your story does not mean I have arrived at the truth on your behalf. More honest sympathy means admitting that one can only obtain that weaker copy, and not treating the copy as the original.

Fiordiligi’s aria continues. She stands in the light, singing shame until it is almost transparent. The horns sound briefly, and the audience in the dark does not move. No one rushes onto the stage, and no one bears the consequences for her. Everyone is still held by the backs of their seats, hands still resting on laps, holding a pain that is weaker, lighter, and can at any moment be put down.