Do You Feel the Deaths of Strangers?

By Roger Rosenblatt

"Any man's death diminishes me." It has always sounded excessive. John Donne expressed that thought more than 350 years ago in a world without mass communications, where a person's death was signaled by a church bell. "It tolls for thee," he said. Does it really? Logic would suggest that an individual's death would not diminish but rather enhance everybody's life, since the more who die off, the more space and materials there will be for those who remain. Before his conversion, Uncle Scrooge preferred to let the poor die "and decrease the surplus population." Scrooge may not have had God on his side, but his arithmetic was impeccable.

Are Donne's words merely a "right" thing to say, then, a slice of holy claptrap dished out at the Christmas season? What does it mean to believe that any man's death diminishes me? In what sense, diminishes? And even if one wholeheartedly accepted Donne's idea, what then? What use could one possibly make of so complete an act of sympathy, particularly when apprised of the deaths of total strangers?

Assume that at the basic minimum the process of diminishing requires a state of grief. Is it really possible to grieve for any person's death? A year ago in Lebanon, a fanatic drove a truck bomb into the Marine compound at Beirut International Airport, killing 241. We responded to those deaths, all right; Americans grieving for Americans. The truck driver also died in the explosion. Any grief left over for him? What about all the Lebanese who have been dropping in the streets for a decade? Feel those deaths, do we? We say yes sincerely, but we only mean that we experience brief pangs of pity and sadness, especially if television shows death close enough to allow us to make identifications with the sufferers.

Last week in a place most Americans never heard of, more than 2,500 residents of Bhopal, India, were killed by leaking toxic gas. How deeply did we really feel that news? Numbers are always tossed up first in such events, but almost as a diversion; there seems a false need to know exactly how many died, how many were hospitalized; reports supersede reports. When the count is finally declared accurate, it is as if one were mourning a quantity rather than people, since the counting exercise is a way of establishing objective significance in the world. Still, we wept at the pictures, for a day or two.

Just as we wept or shook our heads sorrowfully for the citizens of Mexico City who were caught in the gas explosion and fire several weeks ago. Just as we have been weeping for the starving Ethiopians for several weeks in a row. There we could provide more than tears. There was money to send; one could do that.

But Donne seemed to be advocating a response that is deeper and more consistent: Any man's death makes me smaller, less than I was before I learned of that death, because the world is a map of interconnections. As the world decreases in size, so must each of its parts. Donne's math works too. Since the entire world suffers a numerical loss at an individual's death, then one must feel connected to the entire world to feel the subtraction equally.

The equation gets more complicated. Donne liked to think that everyone represented a world within himself. When anyone died, a planet died; messages of condolence should be flashed across the galaxy. All this intricate imagery simply provided a hard shell for soft feelings. In The Third Man, Harry Lime peered down from the top of a Ferris wheel at the dotlike people below, and asked who would really care if one of those dots were to stop moving. Donne saw the dots as close relatives.

For most people the difficulty may lie not in giving dollars or a moment's sympathy to a distant tragedy but in feeling a part of the world in the first place. Show me an Ethiopian mother holding her skin-sore baby-belly ballooned, limbs like an insect's-and my eyes will spill tears. Naturally. What do you take me for? But ask that I see the Ethiopian mother when she is off the screen, in the caves of my mind when I am about my business... ah, well. Donne's thesis was that human sympathy ought not to be what we dust off occasionally but what we display all the time. Thus would we weep not only for death at a distance but for the sufferers who are closer at hand, for the family down the street whose plight goes unnoticed and untelevised-for all those in fact whom we might actually help.

Thus, too, would we be prepared for history's surprises, so that when the species goes berserk and comes up with a Hitler or a Pol Pot, we would not turn our backs on those in danger. In his book Language and Silence, George Steiner was perplexed to consider how the torture-murders committed at Treblinka could be occurring at precisely the same time that people in New York were making love or going to the movies. Were there two kinds of time in the world, Steiner wondered-"good times" and "inhuman time"? The matter was troubling and confusing: "This notion of different orders of time simultaneous but in no effective analogy or communication may be necessary to the rest of us, who were not there, who lived as if on another planet. That, surely, is the point: to discover the relations between those done to death and those alive then, and the relations of both to us."

But it may not be enough to establish a relationship between those done to death and the survivors. It may be necessary to make a connection with all those who die, under any circumstances-any man's death, at any time-in order to keep one's capacity for sympathy vigilant. There may not be two kinds of time in the world, but there seem to be two kinds of sympathy: one that weeps and disappears, and one that never leaves the watch. Sympathy, unlike pity, must have some application to the future. If we do not feel deeply the deaths we are powerless to prevent, how would we be alert to the deaths we might put an end to?

Of course, this is asking a lot of you and me, who are, after all, pretty good people, who recognize despair when we see it and even respond generously when appeals are made. Especially in this season. We are very good in this season. And how realistic was Donne's idea, given human indifference and lapses of memory? Yet at times the world can feel as small as Donne's. If nothing else, we have vulnerability to share. A reporter walking about Bhopal last week remarked how on some streets people were living normally, while adjacent streets were strewn with bodies. Everything depended on where the wind was blowing. -By Roger Rosenblatt