Now Reading: Regarding the Pain of Others #16 Compassion
posted Monday, 23 June 2003
“Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.” (Sontag, p. 101) Art can be, among other things, compassionate action. Is it not an act of compassion to look without blinking at the suffering of others? To face it directly without mixing it with one’s own psychological motivations? Might this not be the first step toward transfiguration?
“But soon my fingers fail’d me, my face droop’d and I resign’d myself,/ To sit by the wounded and soothe them, or silently watch the dead;)
Walt Whitman, The Wound-Dresser, from Leaves of Grass
Go to: Regarding the Pain of Others #17
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