Translation

"How shall I respond to another person's suffering?"
"Empathy?"
"To the extent that such empathy is possible it is also sterile, 'What would I have to gain?' Bakhtin asks, 'If another were to fuse with me? He would see and know only what I already see and know, he would only repeat in himself the inescapable closed circle of my own life; let him rather remain outside me."
(Gary Saul Morson & Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics)
(M. Bakhtin, Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity)

"to be means to communicate"
(M. Bakhtin, Toward A Reworking of the Dostoevsky Book)

"For any individual or social entity, we cannot properly separate existence from the ongoing process of communication."
(Gary Saul Morson & Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics)

I spend most of my time reading about people unlike myself in translation from languages I do not speak. I do my best to know them, at least to listen.

I have been silenced by interruption, often, especially as I've had to detail my physical needs to medical professionals who believe patients talk too much and know too little. Last year, particularly, I kept saying "I am a human being and this is my body." My statements were only heard as further indication of my position as a novitiate in medicine.

My reading and life have taught me to attempt to follow the details and to keep those details in mind. Learning, in my house, was a process of observation. I was never told what to do, though I was certainly expected to do something. The content of my actions were to be shaped by the content of my life, which was shaped by the details of my observations.

What I do not understand I save for later. Sometimes understanding comes. Sometimes I recognize a turn of phrase, a look, or a feeling in my body I can locate in language. What I do not understand I save for later. Sometimes understanding never comes, but I still maintain the conversation, if only in savings.

A world confined to myself is an impossibility, and my idea of torture. I don't want to fuse or dissolve into you. I desire to retain my own shape. I have the same desire for you. In communicating, in being, we can then share those shapes and the changes they make over time and a consequence of experience. I find compassion a better word for this than empathy. It speaks to the level of awareness, the attention to detail, the process of listening and manner of reaching for meaning I pursue.