Between the Wolf in the Tall Grass and the Wolf in the Tall Story

In June 2017 I delivered a talk called “Between the Wolf in the Tall Grass and the Wolf in the Tall Story,” which is about what I see as the dubious place of empathy in the making of art. Over the past months, and in collaboration with Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, memoirist Daniel Raeburn, and MFA student William Gatewood, I developed that talk into a mini-course that has now been published at Longreads. Much of the talk reflects on my experiences teaching at Lang, and Lang classrooms appear throughout. Here’s just one such moment:

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Once, long ago, teaching an essay I had never taught before — but one I now feel like I know like the back of my hand, Michael Pollan’s 2002 “An Animal’s Place” — I reached a point in the conversation with students known as Awkward Silence. I looked up from the head of the seminar table. Blinks. The shuffling of papers. This was before the ubiquity of smartphones, so they weren’t ignoring me with those yet. I looked back down to the essay. My heart sank — then raced. My mouth went dry. Perhaps you know this feeling. Perhaps you can relate, empathize. Back to the essay, maybe I read aloud:

It can be argued that human pain differs from animal pain by an order of magnitude. This qualitative difference is largely the result of our possession of language and, by virtue of language, an ability to have thoughts about thoughts and to imagine alternatives to our current reality. The philosopher Daniel C. Dennett suggests that we would do well to draw a distinction between pain, which a great many animals experience, and suffering, which depends on a degree of self-consciousness only a few animals appear to command. Suffering in this view is not just lots of pain but pain intensified by human emotions like loss, sadness, worry, regret, self-pity, shame, humiliation and dread.

I looked back to my students. Still nothing — from me or them.

“Excuse me,” I said, just barely holding onto my vision — it was fading fast — and I fled the room. I was gone for about five minutes and returned with a Tropicana and a Kind Bar, blaming it all on my blood sugar — not shame, humiliation or dread, though I certainly felt all that. We went on. Class dismissed. The semester ended. I survived.

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I hope you might go and read more. (Art by J.D. Reeves.)

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