“One need not become another person, or to have had exactly the same experience, in order to imagine that person’s life — which is why the foundation of metaphor is empathy. Art and metaphor do not make other people’s experiences identical. They make other people’s experiences imaginable [italics author’s].” So says David Moser in Sontag: Her Life and Work, taking issue with Sontag’s final paragraph in Regarding the Pain of Others in which she claims we cannot understand or imagine what others have gone through unless we’ve served on the front lines with them. I agree with Moser, and bristle when creative people are accused of cultural appropriation, which denies our capacity for imagination and our right to empathize with the human condition. On the contrary, creativity demands that we go beyond our own boundaries and enter the world of the other. See more of my thoughts on writing in REFLECTIONS.
