I’ve been thinking about my mixed feelings with Verluis’ book. Around 3 AM today I found myself thinking about that book and about an essay I deeply admire by Cynthia Ozick called “Mrs. Virginia Woolf and Her Nurse“. When I caught myself thinking of them together, I searched for the connection I had subconsciously perceived, because apart from the fact that they are both in English, they are very different bits of work. What came to me was was the phrase “compassionate writing.” I now think that I didn’t respond whole-heartedly to Verluis’ book is because it isn’t what I think of as compassionate writing. So, in fact, it wasn’t a connection I was seeking between Ozick and Versluis but a difference.

When reading Verluis, I got the strongest sense that he was hiding something. Not data, of course. And no, I do not think he misrepresents his study. Rather, I think he is hiding himself, hiding something essential about his response to his subject, and by doing that he is unintentionally hiding his subject from me.

I don’t mean that academics should go all wishy-washy, touchy-feely with their subjects. That’s often the cruelest writing, abounding in sentimentalism but lacking any real empathy, and therefore negating any chance of presenting the subject’s world with the passion that it evoked in the subjects and made it interesting to the author in the first place. To understand alchemists and magicians if you are not one, you need to walk willingly into an adjoining emotional room: feeling, as Damasio has shown, is a necessary corollary to good thinking.

Ozick constructs the “adjoining room” for the reader in her essay on Virginia Woolf. That’s one of the reason’s I so admire the work. She starts it by acknowledging the difficulty that we have understanding what it was like be a part of that literary time and place, of that peculiar mind, and then, given we are primed with a sense of our limitations as empathetic readers, Ozick presents us with a series of photo-clip moments that promptly drop us into a sense of vivid life, but life cut-up, parceled, with a sense of shared limitations and the preset idea that like a photograph, life will gradually fade and we will diminish. Very between-the-wars. Very Virginia. This is what I call compassionate writing.

Perhaps it is too much to expect from Verluis’ book, that I come to feel the world of those practitioners he studies, but I think that history, in order to be assimilated in any meaningful way into our consciousness and our current sense of self and society must be presented in such a way as to evoke the feeling-sense of the subject’s world.

Anyway, it is not enough just to have the facts – which Versluis presents with admirable thoroughness – to really do justice to a subject, the writer has to provide a window through which the reader can at least peer, if not crawl, to establish a empathetic connection with the mindset of the subject. As Atran and Medin show in their study (the subject of several recent posts), knowledge while essential, cannot break us open from our customary assumptions, our prejudices. To do that we must understand the values that motivate; we must come to the possibility of empathy.

Verluis has the doubly-difficult task of getting us to jump the prejudicial barriers to understanding simultaneously the mindsets of those distanced by time and life-style (history) and in addition radically different assumptions about how the world works (esotericism). After all, that is why we call such practices esoteric in the first place. To the people who practiced them, who thought it obvious that “as it is above so below,” planting by the moon was no more esoteric than watering the garden through a dry spell is to us. That sense of obviousness, that “of courseness” is what I miss from Verluis’ book; I want to understand his subjects like that. I want to feel what was simply obvious to them, for the duration of my reading, to share a conceptual room with those whose lives made the world in which I live.