A True Story
The following is a true story.
The other night I was watching a nice DVD called In America. It's a story that tugs at your heart, about a family (the Sullivan's) of four Irish immigrants to NYC who have no money and are simultaneously dealing with making a new life in this new city and mourning the death of their 5-year old boy named Franky who ( Read more... )
The other night I was watching a nice DVD called In America. It's a story that tugs at your heart, about a family (the Sullivan's) of four Irish immigrants to NYC who have no money and are simultaneously dealing with making a new life in this new city and mourning the death of their 5-year old boy named Franky who ( Read more... )
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Mark Kingwell in the (otherwise disappointing) World We Want briefly talks about imagination as the new human universal--a universality of imagination of sorts. Only through imagination, says he, can we see beyond our own limited experiences and learn or appreciate the value of what we do not immediately know (of what we can only imagine).
It is through these fictions--those we fashion out of the clay of our experience--that we can give a proper voice to this suffering, this truth.
Absolutely. And indeed, only through our imagination (from the Latin "to picture oneself") can we empathize with the characters' experiences; through reason alone we would have no reason to care about their suffering--and, perhaps, your fictions.
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I really like the connection between imagination and empathy you make in your last sentence. It almost seems paradoxical, but contrary to popular belief, a life of imagination is not at all solipsistic!
:-)
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