Reading for Empathy

I went to the library the other day to pick up two books that I had on hold. When I emerged, I was carrying six. This happens regularly. My tendency to borrow (and also buy) books verges on the extreme. Partially, it’s fueled by wishful thinking. Of course, I am going to get to all of those books. And it’s partially a professional consequence of writing. But it’s also driven by a desire to learn and experience more. Just imagine what all those pages hold.

The books stack up around the house. On the nightstand. On the coffee table. On the kitchen table. On the floor. My desk where I write is currently piled high with research books for the one that I am working on. The only free space is the small rectangle of cleared area where my laptop sits.

There’s a lovely Japanese word for all of these piles of unread books: tsundoku. The word is a hybrid of tsunde-oku (to let things pile up) and dokusho (to read books). In Japanese, the word itself does not have a negative connotation about an inability to clean or organize, simply that you really do love books.

Every time I go to the library, I marvel at what the shelves hold. This is not just a promise of knowledge, but something even more powerful: the promise of ideas. Reading more books may lead to knowing a few more things, but more importantly, it leaves you wanting to learn more. Books open up worlds you might never have access to yourself.

As poet John Keats once wrote, “Nothing ever becomes real until it is experienced.” We can’t experience everything in this world because we have only our own eyes, our own bodies. The experience of others may not belong to us, but that doesn’t make them any less valid. We must be able to understand what someone else is experiencing. This is what allows us to build a world that isn’t just about our own needs but about strengthening and supporting a shared humanity.

Research shows that reading fiction happens to serve as an important tool for building empathy for this very reason. When you read fiction, several things happen in your brain. Your temporal lobe, which is the language processing part of the brain, activates. That makes sense — you’re processing words in your brain to understand them. But we don’t just understand fiction on a cerebral level. We feel it too. As we read, other parts of the brain activate, like those responsible for physical movement and sensory experiences. In other words, it’s as if our brain thinks that we are actually in the experience of the story.

It’s your brain’s way of putting you into another experience, even without physically being there.

Art in general has an excellent capacity for encouraging more empathy, but having access to art isn’t always a given. This is the radical power of public libraries: these worlds are accessible to everyone. It’s also why I am always so impressed by our own local library, where books and art are available all under one roof.

I had the chance to interview poet Maggie Smith recently. One of my favorite questions to ask writers and artists is, “What does it mean to be creative?” I loved her answer: “To be creative is to push back, again and again, against despair, complacency, and cruelty.” Those of us who are writers and artists can feel that deeply. Creativity is our way to take a stand for what we believe in, to build, mold, sculpt, and create something new instead of engaging in a simple act of destruction. But we also get the benefit of that intention when we consume the work. This is the power of books, of stepping into worlds that someone else has taken the time to build through words, metaphors, sentences, and similes.

Human survival has long depended not on great individual feats, but on acts of caring. Archaeological evidence for how we have taken care of each other goes back at least 1.5 million years, predating modern humans. Caring for the sick, sharing resources, protecting our neighborhoods — this is how humans have made it through the darkest of times.

In thinking and reading about empathy, I stumbled upon a video about empathy as a human evolutionary advantage, presented by Bill Nye. Yes, the Science Guy. “Just consider what a tribe of humans would be like without empathy, without ability to feel what someone else is feeling, without ability to see it from another person’s point of view,” Nye said. “You probably wouldn’t be a very successful tribe.”

The point is: we need empathy to survive, to grow, to develop, to progress. Fortunately, empathy functions like a muscle, which means that we can train it, strengthen it. Books are just one way of doing that, but they are a powerful one.

Those library shelves, those stacks of books? They are full of promise.

Anna Brones is a writer and an artist who lives in Home.