From Indifference to Compassion: Literature, Art, and the Common Human Experience
Abigail Storch, sophomore
2102 Villa Dr.
Greensboro, NC 27403
astorch@eastern.edu
(336)404-1680
1
In his 1999 White House address, “On the Perils of Indifference,” Holocaust survivor
Elie Wiesel warns that it is profoundly dangerous to remain apathetic to the suffering and
experiences of other human beings.1 Wiesel remarks that though it is admittedly inconvenient
and troublesome to become involved in another’s pain, to refrain from doing so is inhuman - it is
to deny both the humanity of the other and to betray one’s own. He goes onto explain that to be
indifferent is to reduce one’s fellow human beings to creatures of no consequence, meaningless
abstractions that can be easily overlooked in favor of more important matters. However, the one
on whom tragedy has fallen because of others’ indifference has a certain duty to society: to speak
out and tell his story. “For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear
witness for the dead and for the living,” Wiesel declares. “He has no right to deprive future
generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only
dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.”2 For
the sake of the human race, Wiesel exhorts the audience to listen attentively to the stories of
others and to tell their own, for the very act of telling and hearing stories is the act of eradicating
this perilous indifference.
Art and literature serve as media for truth in a manner that disallows the public that
tempting luxury of remaining uninvolved. Rather than intellectual abstractions that remain
detached from imagination and emotion, art and literature demonstrate truth by inviting
participation in an experience that embodies truth in tangible human terms and shows how truth
plays an active role in the human life. Participation in experience through the media of art or
literature integrates feeling and imagination with rational thought. In this way, art and literature
1
Elie Wiesel, “On the Perils of Indifference” (speech delivered at the White House, Washington, D.C., April 12,
1999).
2
Elie Wiesel, Preface to Night (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), xv.
2
recognize and validate the complete personhood of the listener as a human being whose
experiences are inextricably composed of sense and emotion as well as deduction and reason.
The integration of the human elements of emotion and reason affirm the humanity of the reader
or observer, and he finds himself involved in the experience to which he has been made privy
through art or literature. In short, he has been moved to care for his fellow humans.
Further, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn raises the question of the purpose of art and literature in
his 1970 Nobel address. “Why this gift to us?” he queries. “How should we treat it?”3
Solzhenitsyn describes the immense power that art and literature hold as media for truth and
explores the ways in which this power ought to be wielded. In the present age, it seems that art
and literature are not often used to transmit experiences to illumine the truth of common ties of
humanity; rather, the artist now chooses to create his own miniature cosmos in which he governs,
however unintelligible the work may be to others. How might we seek, in the present culture, to
regain a sense of the role of art and literature not as tools of self-expression, but as media for
describing truth?
Solzhenitsyn expresses this very tension in his speech and declares that in a culture where
truth and goodness have been “crushed, cut down, or not permitted to grow,”4 there remains that
mystery which softens the human heart and causes even the coldest of humans to care for his
neighbor and to feel compassion: the mystery that is beauty. Beauty shines ever more luminous
in the face of great darkness, and truth rings out most clearly in defiance of violence and lies. In
art and literature, the beauty of those things common to all humans shoots through the fog of
3
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Nobel Lecture,” in The Solzhenitsyn Reader, ed. Edward E. Ericson, Jr. and Daniel J.
Mahoney (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2006), 514.
4
Ibid,, 515.
3
self-expression and uncertainty and reinstates the validity of truth in a manner that draws humans
toward both the truth and one another.
What can we do to fight indifference? We must tell the stories where truth speaks against
violence, where beauty glows in the midst of suffering, where men seek and sacrifice for the
good of the other. We must also bear witness to the perpetration of the horrors that humans have
wrought upon one another because of hatred or neglect, and we must remain vigilant in the
responsibility of moving the indifferent individual to care for the other, moving the public as a
whole toward compassion, toward sight of that truth that cannot be denied in the face of an evil
that threatens to overcome. Solzhenitsyn describes the true artist as one who can “sense more
keenly” the depth of man’s purpose and communicate it to others.5 Through the media of art and
literature, we must bear witness to this so that others may be moved from indifference toward
compassion, for compassion for one’s neighbor compels him to act in the interest of the good of
the other, the common good, in which his own good is found.
However, our responsibility is not just to our fellow man and to the common good, but to
the Truth itself. We must pay the utmost attention to the stories of others in order to escape our
own indifference, the indifference that stems from ignorance. On the unique ability of art and
literature to engender in a person genuine care for his fellow man, Solzhenitsyn says, “They both
hold the key to a miracle: to overcome man’s ruinous habit of learning only from his own
experience, so that the experience of others passes him by without profit.”6 We not only have the
responsibility of telling truth and moving others to care through art and literature, but of hearing
and responding to the truth as well.
5
6
Ibid., 513.
Ibid., 519.
4
In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Elie Wiesel declares that it is the duty of the
human being to bear witness to the truth for the sake of all others. Art and literature exist because
humans must know that “when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that while their
freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs.”7 This is the role of art
and literature in today’s society: to tell, to show, to cause individuals to be moved by pain and
beauty toward truth and the common good. As Solzhenitsyn poignantly muses, “Not everything
can be named. Some things draw us beyond words.”8 Indeed, art and literature serve to express
truth that cannot be stated in concise terms. Through inviting participation in common human
experience, art and literature connect us to one another, cause us to care for one another, and
compel us toward the truth that transcends our individual experiences but somehow encompasses
them all.
7
8
Wiesel,120.
Solzhenitsyn, 514.