One Good Graf: Compassion for Objects
An excerpt from Alexandra Horowitz's On Looking
As we face a cold winter, with spiking covid cases and fewer opportunities to gather outside*, Alexandra Horowitz's On Looking is a good book to pick up. She takes eleven turns around her usual route with different experts to help her see the world in finer detail and offer her invitations to wonder.
Her first, baseline walk is taken with her toddler, an expert in appreciating the everyday:
While much is made, in scholastic circles, of how to develop a child’s moral understanding, I sense that this built in animistic tendency gives children a sensitivity that adults cannot teach. The child might, upon collecting a flower, collect several others to keep it “company”; or she might adjust a stone’s position on a path to give it different views to gaze at; or feel obliged to put a stone back where it was found, so that it should not “suffer from having been moved.” Compassion emerges from imagining the world alive. I myself felt that I was losing the sensitivity to broken chairs left out on the street that I once had. When I was a younger adult, I insisted on adopting these chairs, taking them in, mending the weave on their broken seats or the fractured leg. I’d give them a fresh paint and introduce them to the rather large population of chairs already living at my house. Soon, though I had no couch for guests to loiter on, I could host a Thanksgiving dinner for twenty on mismatched chairs. I now pass them by. Maybe my son will renew our collection.
I feel I haven’t entirely grown out of this, though I understand not to be too obvious about it. I have very strong feelings about which kitchen utensils want to be used for which purposes, where they feel most at home, and that it is charming to always use the same plates from the top of the stack, which are then our workhorse plates, while the rest wait, anticipating a party.
*before we give ourselves up to loneliness, I do think there will be ways to gather safely, but we’ll need to adapt practices from more cold-weather climates. I’m going to get a thermos for the first time, for hot chocolate walks with friends, and I plan on sledding. I’d love to hear your ideas. I really like Moscow’s baked potato stands (it reminds me of the March girls walking to school clutching apple turnovers!).
This is a really interesting paragraph! A little afield from this, but it reminded me of the way objects are treated in the law. Courts sometimes exercise "in rem" jurisdiction, where the court takes cognizance of objects themselves as "parties". We recently had a case in Massachusetts captioned "United States v. Letter from Alexander Hamilton to the Marquis de Lafayette Dated July 21, 1780" (these in rem cases often have quirky names). Usually in rem cases determine the ownership rights of the parties in a certain object as against the world, and the object itself fills the role traditionally occupied by a "party" to the suit. In rem jurisdiction has roots in admiralty (maritime law), and on this score Holmes makes an interesting observation in The Common Law: "A ship is the most living of inanimate things. Servants sometimes say "she" of a clock, but every one gives a gender to vessels. . . . It is only by supposing the ship to have been treated as if endowed with personality, that the arbitrary seeming peculiarities of the maritime law can be made intelligible, and on that supposition they at once become consistent and logical."
This entry is resonating with me because it touches profoundly on some of the oldest tendencies in our legal system: the treatment of harmful objects. Forgive the long quotation here, also Holmes:
"There is a well-known passage in Exodus, which we shall have to remember later: "If an ox gore a man or a woman, that they die: then the ox shall be surely stoned, and his flesh shall not be eaten; but the owner of the ox shall be quit." When we turn from the Jews to the Greeks, we find the principle of the passage just quoted erected into a system. Plutarch, in his Solon, tells us that a dog that had bitten a man was to be delivered up bound to a log four cubits long. Plato made elaborate provisions in his Laws for many such cases. If a slave killed a man, he was to be given up to the relatives of the deceased. If he wounded a man, he was to be given up to the injured party to use him as he pleased. . . . If a beast killed a man, it was to be slain and cast beyond the borders. If an inanimate thing caused death, it was to be cast beyond the borders in like manner, and expiation was to be made. Nor was all this an ideal creation of merely imagined law, for it was said in one of the speeches of Aeschines, that "we banish beyond our borders stocks and stones and steel, voiceless and mindless things, if they chance to kill a man; and if a man commits suicide, bury the hand that struck the blow afar from its body." This is mentioned quite as an every-day matter, evidently without thinking it at all extraordinary, only to point an antithesis to the honors heaped upon Demosthenes. As late as the second century after Christ the traveller Pausanias observed with some surprise that they still sat in judgment on inanimate things in the Prytaneum."
And a little later: "The Twelve Tables (451 B.C.) provided that, if an animal had done damage, either the animal was to be surrendered or the damage paid for. We learn from Gaius that the same rule was applied to the torts of children or slaves, and there is some trace of it with regard to inanimate things."
He links this treatment of inanimate objects with speculation about how our modern theory of agency arose (e.g. master responsible for the wrongdoing of slaves, or the trespass of his chattel): "In other words, vengeance on the immediate offender was the object of the Greek and early Roman process, not indemnity from the master or owner. The liability of the owner was simply a liability of the offending thing. In the primitive customs of Greece it was enforced by a judicial process expressly directed against the object, animate or inanimate."
Holmes also discusses the idea of a "deodand" or a thing forfeited because it caused death: "In Edward the First's time . . . [I]f a man fell from a tree, the tree was deodand. If he drowned in a well, the well was to be filled up. It did not matter that the forfeited instrument belonged to an innocent person. "Where a man killeth another with the sword of John at Stile, the sword shall be forfeit as deodand, and yet no default is in the owner." That is from a book written in the reign of Henry VIII., about 1530. And it has been repeated from Queen Elizabeth's time to within one hundred years, that if my horse strikes a man, and afterwards I sell my horse, and after that the man dies, the horse shall be forfeited."
There is certainly something very human about our personification of objects (especially in a negative sense), as exemplified in our legal history.
Thanks for all of the great posts!
-Shamus
I really relate to this. I remember back to about sixth grade, when I was allowed to walk to the drugstore with my friends to buy a candy bar. I would buy a different one each time, always remembering which ones I had already bought, because I didn't want any of them to feel left out.