Paying attention is the foundational act of empathy

“This paying attention is the foundational act of empathy, of listening, of seeing, of imagining experiences other than one’s own, of getting out of the boundaries of one’s own experience. There’s a currently popular argument that books help us feel empathy, but if they do so they do it by helping us imagine that we are people we are not. Or to go deeper within ourselves, to be more aware of what it means to be heartbroken, or ill, or six, or ninety-six, or completely lost. Not just versions of our self rendered awesome and eternally justified and always right, living in a world in which other people only exist to help reinforce our magnificence, though those kinds of books and comic books and movies exist in abundance to cater to the male imagination. Which is a reminder that literature and art can also help us fail at empathy if it sequesters us in the Boring Old Fortress of Magnificent Me.”

p. 241-243

Solnit, R. (2017). Men explain Lolita to me. Essay in The mother of all questions (pp. 234-277). Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.

Every listener has its own plan for hearing what it needs to

Just as every place has its own acoustic signature, every listener has its own plan for hearing what it needs to. There are about fifty thousand kinds of listeners in the vertebrate world, each with its own solution to the problem of what to listen to and usually very closely tied to the acoustics of its normal environment. Of all these, maybe one hundred have been explored scientifically (and most data are drawn from about a dozen, including zebrafish, goldfish, toadfish, bullfrogs, clawed toads, mice, rats, gerbils, cats, bats, dolphins, and humans).

At one level this is okay. Hearing in all vertebrates is based on using hair cells in some configuration to detect changes in pressure or particle motion and converting this into useful perceptions to help guide behaviour. Once you get past the ears, vertebrate brains derive from a similar general plan – hindbrain receiving and sending much of the raw sensorimotor information, midbrain integrating both incoming and outgoing information, thalamus acting as a relay centre to forward brain regions, and forebrain governing intentional behaviour. But on the other hand, every species has developed its own solution to what it should hear. And to make it worse, every individual shows differences from that species’s version of ‘normal’, not only through genetic variation but also by what it has been exposed to over the course of its own life. So trying to understand hearing and all its variations from such a small sample of species can be very frustrating.

(page 29)

Horowitz, S. S. (2012). The universal sense: How hearing shapes the mind. New York, NY: Bloomsbury USA.

What is it like to weaponize your body?

“Love is a constant negotiation, a constant conversation; to love someone is to lay yourself open to rejection and abandonment; love is something you can earn but not extort. It is an arena in which you are not in control, because someone else also has rights and decisions; it is a collaborative process; making love is at best a process in which those negotiations become joy and play. So much sexual violence is a refusal of that vulnerability; so many of the instructions about masculinity inculcate a lack of skills and willingness to negotiate in good faith. Inability and entitlement deteriorate into a rage to control, to turn a conversation into a monologue of commands, to turn the collaboration of making love into the imposition of assault and the assertion of control. Rape is hate and fury taking love’s place between bodies. It’s a vision of the male body as a weapon and the female body (in heterosexual rape) as the enemy. What is it like to weaponize your body?”

p. 67

Solnit, R. (2017). A short history of silence. Essay in The mother of all questions (pp. 60-86). Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.

A person who mistakes his opinions for facts

“It is a fact universally acknowledged that a woman in possession of an opinion must be in want of a correction. Well, actually, no it isn’t, but who doesn’t love riffing on Jane Austen and her famous opening sentence? The answer is: lots of people, because we’re all different and some of us haven’t even read Pride and Prejudice dozens of times, but the main point is that I’ve been performing interesting experiments in proffering my opinions and finding that some of the people out there, particularly men, respond on the grounds that my opinion is wrong, while theirs is right because they are convinced that their opinion is a fact, while mine is a delusion. Sometimes they also seem to think that they are in charge, of me as well as of facts.

It isn’t a fact universally acknowledged that a person who mistakes his opinions for facts may also mistake himself for God. This can happen if he’s been insufficiently exposed to the fact that there are also other people who have other experiences, and they too were created equal, with certain inalienable rights, and that consciousness thing that is so interesting and troubling is also going on inside these other people’s heads. This is a problem straight white men suffer from especially, because the Western world has held up a mirror to them for so long – and turns compliant women into mirrors reflecting them back twice life size, Virginia Woolf noted.”

p. 234-247

Solnit, R. (2017). Men explain Lolita to me. Essay in The mother of all questions (pp. 234-277). Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.

Any surface that sound can strike

If you are reading this book in your bedroom, a train, a bus, or a classroom, every surface in that space – tables, walls, even other people – can and will change any sounds that are generated within earshot. Any surface that sound can strike will change it in some way, and the materials that make up or cover those surfaces will change the sound in a unique fashion. Even the simplest sound played in an uncluttered room, ten feet in any dimension with relatively bare walls, will generate thousands of overlapping echoes. And since each frequency has its own wavelength and hence changes in phase and amplitude as it strikes the surfaces, these echoes interfere with each other, sometimes making certain frequencies louder via constructive interference or quieter by destructive interference.

The summation of all these complex changes to the original sound is called reverberation and involves not only the tens of thousands of individual echoes but also the damping and amplification caused by constructive and destructive interference from anything in the space.

(page 21-22)

Horowitz, S. S. (2012). The universal sense: How hearing shapes the mind. New York, NY: Bloomsbury USA.

Their words took root in minds

“Who has been heard we know; they are the well-mapped islands, the rest are the unmappable sea of unheard, unrecorded humanity. Many over the centuries were heard and loved, and their words disappeared in the air as soon as they were spoken but took root in minds, contributed to the culture, like something composting into rich earth; new things grew from those words. Many others were silenced, excluded, ignored. The earth is seven-tenths water, but the ratio of silence to voice is far greater. If libraries hold all the stories that have been told, there are ghost libraries of all the stories that have not. The ghosts outnumber the books by some unimaginably vast sum. Even those who have been audible have often earned the privilege through strategic silences or the inability to hear certain voices, including their own.”

p. 62-63

Solnit, R. (2017). A short history of silence. Essay in The mother of all questions (pp. 60-86). Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.

The categorical exceptions are important

“That we imagine the two main genders are opposite or opposing tightens up the categories and the ways they define each other. The idea that gender is a false binary i sa useful one, yet gender is also an inescapably useful thing in talking about who does what to whom and has done over the ages. […]

We must speak, and in speaking we must use categories such as Black and white, male and female. We must also understand the limits of these categories, their leakiness, and that male and female modify Black and white and vice versa. The categorical exceptions are important, both of those who were born with anomalous anatomy and those who have an anomalous relationship to their anatomy and the identity assigned on that basis.”

p. 225

Solnit, R. (2017). The pigeonholes when the doves have flown. Essay in The mother of all questions (pp. 222-226). Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.

The sound fades away

Sound waves propagate through the air in a spherical pattern, widening out from whatever made the sound. In theory it could spread out nearly forever, losing energy based on the square of the distance from the sound source, but things get in the way, making the sound lose energy. Sound can be refracted, bent by things as simple as changes in the density of the air; reflected, bouncing off hard surfaces; or absorbed into a surface, adding a bit of heat to the structure but losing the energy of the sound. As things refract, reflect, or absorb sound, the sound gets distorted, losing strength and cohesion. The more things are in the way, the more the sound fades away.

(page 19)

Horowitz, S. S. (2012). The universal sense: How hearing shapes the mind. New York, NY: Bloomsbury USA.

The idea of voice expanded to the idea of agency

“By voice, I don’t mean only literal voice – the sound produced by the vocal chords for the ears of others – but the ability to speak up, to participate, to experience oneself and be experienced as a free person with rights. This includes the right to not speak, whether it’s the right against being tortured to confess, as political prisoners are, or not to be expected to service strangers who approach you, as some men do to young women, demanding attention and flattery and punishing their absence. The idea of voice expanded to the idea of agency includes wide realms of power and powerlessness.

Who has been unheard? The sea is vast, and the surface of the ocean is unmappable. We know who has, mostly, been heard on the official subjects: who held office, attended university, commanded armies, served as judges and juries, wrote books, and ran empires over the past several centuries. We know how it has changed somewhat, thanks to the countless revolutions of the twentieth century and after – against colonialism, against racism, against misogyny, against the innumerable enforced silences homophobia exposed, and so much more. We know that in the United States class was levelled out to some extent in the twentieth century and then reinforced toward the end, through income inequality and the withering away of social mobility and the rise of a new extreme elite. Poverty silences.”

p. 62

Solnit, R. (2017). A short history of silence. Essay in The mother of all questions (pp. 60-86). Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.

Learning how to conduct the orchestra of words

“Really, what I’m arguing for is the possibility of an art of using and not using category, of being deft and supple and imaginative or maybe just fully awake in how we imagine and describe the world and our experiences of it. Not too tight, not too loose, as a Zen master once put it. Categories are necessary to speech, especially to political and social speech, in which we discuss general tendencies. They’re fundamental to language; if language is categories – rain, dreams, jails – then speech is about learning how to conduct the orchestra of words into something precise and maybe even beautiful. Or at least to describe your world well and address others fairly.”

p. 224

Solnit, R. (2017). The pigeonholes when the doves have flown. Essay in The mother of all questions (pp. 222-226). Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.