Not getting it
Kate Harding, who contributes to The Bibliophilistines, wrote a great post about Nando Parrado’s book Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home. Harding talks about the way books often romanticize extreme trials like this alpine plane crash/cannibalism/mounteering disaster, despite the fact that in reality, such situations are not full of heroic drama, they just plain suck.
The analyis is wonderful, but my favorite line in the post is this:
“getting that we don’t get it is as close as we can come to getting it.”
As a white upper middle class male who has identified as straight for most of my life, that’s an uncomfortable state I am very familiar with. Empathy only gets you so far.
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Yes.
This is worth thinking about more. You can get to that place – “I just can’t get it” – and recognize that that’s your limit, and stop, but what’s the point? It reminds me of the idea of “music appreciation” class – “inequality appreciation.” What if you don’t stop there but start a new line of questioning: What exactly don’t I get? What can I really not relate to? Why not? Are there reasons beyond physical inexperience? Are there ways around that? How can I get just a little bit closer? Etc etc. Maybe gives you some new “meat” to gnaw on, if you know what I mean. Though, it seems as though you’ve got a pretty full plate as is.
That, and you’re a vegan.
We should have a snowedin conference. What do you say?
I say: sounds awesome. What would that mean exactly? People submit papers about anything ever blogged about on snowedin.net?
Uh, that, and/or maybe we just hang out and talk about shit. Formality’s really not my style, but yeah, papers make sense. When I suggested it, I was just thinking, hey, it’d be fun to sit around and talk to these people about this stuff.
Yeah, and travel.