Somebody Else’s Shoes

By Sidney S. Stark
Can you put yourself in somebody else’s shoes? I’ve never doubted for a moment that I could until last year after I’d been to a lecture given by Elizabeth Strout on the subject of how she structures her novels. In the process of explaining her approach to the start of her work she made it clear the characters always present themselves first rather than the narrative. Elizabeth’s innate curiosity about what makes people tick takes over and she has to find out what that character is all about. That explains why she won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for her work Olive Kitteridge which is so powerfully character-driven. That said, I found it even more interesting to hear her reason for being mesmerized by the people who beckon to her from that primordial soup she finds them in, and of course her faith in the creative process to reveal them.

After describing the start of her novel Olive Kitteridge as a vision she’d had of a woman standing at a picnic table set up in her garden for a family wedding, she explained she was driven to find out why the woman looked as she did and why there was a certain magnetic aura around her. Many novels start out as visions of a particular scene in the author’s head so that in and of itself didn’t give me too much pause for thought. But her comment that followed did. Ms. Strout said she’d always had a yearning to know what it felt like to be another human being; she was haunted by the thought that she could never really know since she could never actually be anyone but herself. She feels it’s that passion to identify with another’s life experience right down to the level of perceiving their soul that drives her to write in the first place. The writing is the best way to put herself, as it were, in somebody else’s shoes; and I sense also her way of coming to know herself better through them.

I tried very hard both at the lecture itself, and also after it for quite awhile, to understand what she was struggling with. I assumed that I wasn’t getting deep enough into her analysis and that’s why I couldn’t appreciate her challenge. Admittedly, there was and still is a chance that I’m not capable of stripping off as many psychological or philosophical layers as she is; a bit like my inability to truly contemplate infinity or the scope of the universe. But even after giving her dilemma months to percolate and ferment in my thoughts I still have the same reaction I did when I first heard her revelation. Fitting into someone else’s shoes easily as I think I do is not always a comfortable place to be. It can create an overly sensitized nervous system that would be much more relaxed somewhere else. But that ability to lose oneself in another is what I’ve always loved about reading and acting, and also about writing. All those creative endeavors provide the practitioner with an open door to another world. They made my personal escape possible from my earliest childhood recollections.

But is it possibly true, or is it just that I’m fooling myself into thinking I can feel as others do? Did Elizabeth Strout have a different and deeper meaning that I’ve missed? I honestly don’t think so, but maybe you can apprise me of an error in my reasoning. I think I know what it feels like to be almost anyone other than me and I wish more people could transmigrate empathetically. Maybe that would take care of a lot of misunderstandings. Is it even necessary in order to promote social understanding? Of course it is; and you can get a lot closer if you know what it feels like to be someone else as well as if you understand yourself better.

Question@You: Can you put yourself in somebody else’s shoes? Does it matter?

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