Value for Thursday of Week 20 in the season of Growth

Understanding

“Understanding” refers to the thinking component of empathy. It is the next step beyond acknowledging another’s humanity.

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view . . . until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it. [Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird – Atticus Finch speaking of Boo Radley.]
Be patient and understanding. Life is too short to be vengeful or malicious. [attributed to Phillips Brooks]
Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding. [Albert Einstein]

In his “Essay on Human Understanding”, John Locke expounded on understanding concepts, as did David Hume in his “Enquiry”. This section refers to understanding people.

“We cannot help but impute emotions to the behaviors of others, and constantly infer not only what others are feeling, but also why they feel that way.” We can best understand others when we understand ourselves. “Self–other understanding forms the backbone of social cognition and is a central concept explored by research into basic processes such as action perception and empathy, as well as research on more sophisticated social behaviours such as cooperation and intergroup interaction.”

When we understand someone better, usually, we can more readily get along with that person. There are fewer disagreements, and whatever disagreements we have will be tempered by understanding, especially if the other person reciprocates. In ethical/spiritual development, understanding precedes appreciation and wisdom.

Real

True Narratives

Understanding is a key element in diplomacy. One of recent history’s great diplomats is Henry Kissinger.

Walter Isaacson, Kissinger: A Biography (Simon & Schuster, 2005).
Henry Kissinger, On China (Penguin Press, 2011): how the diplomat contributed to peace by understanding adversary nations.
Martin Indyk, Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and theArt of Middle East Diplomacy (Alfred A. Knopf, 2021): “Serving as President Richard Nixon’s foreign policy surrogate, Kissinger turned a series of disasters into opportunities for remaking the region. After a coalition of Arab states attacked and nearly destroyed Israel during the Yom Kippur observance of 1973, Kissinger managed the emergency resupply of Israeli military forces by the United States. When the Israeli Army turned the tide and entered Egyptian and Syrian territory, Kissinger dived into the maelstrom to negotiate an end to the conflict.”
Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (Simon & Schuster, 1994).

Other books on diplomacy:

Mohamed ElBaradei, The Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times (Henry Holt & Company, 2011): “ElBaradei passionately advocates diplomacy as the main recourse against nuclear proliferation.”

Understanding Jane Austen:

Lucy Worsley, Jane Austen at Home (St. Martin’s Press, 2017): This is a book about how and where Austen lived, and died.
Paula Byrne, The Genius of Jane Austen: Her Love of Theatre and Why She Works in Hollywood (Harper Perennial Paper, 2017). “Byrne’s investigation into Austen’s enjoyment of plays during a period when theatre was both popular and lucrative and when playwrights and actors were questioning and mocking social norms (especially those dictating male/female relationships) gives real insight into how Austen learned to focus her material, make amusing and give it critical punch.”
Helena Kelly, Jane Austen: The Secret Radical (Alfred A. Knopf, 2017). This biography portrays Austen as a social critic.

Other narratives on understanding:

Ben Ryder Howe, My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store (Henry Holt & Company, 2011): “a portrait of two people Howe comes to understand much better through his own travails.”
Christopher de Bellaigue, The Islamic Enlightenment: The Struggle Between Faith and Reason: 1798 to Modern Times (Liveright Publishing, 2017). “A book like this can only point to the sheer complexity of Mediterranean identities, loyalties and accommodations in the modern world . . . Far from spurning or avoiding modernity, Muslims are ‘drenched in it’ . . . and in tracking the sinews of enlightenment through the last two centuries of Islamic thinking, this brilliant and lively history deserves nothing but praise.”
Joshua Rivkin, Chalk: The Art and Erasure of Cy Twombley (Melville House, 2018), on trying to understand an artist who remained purposefully secretive throughout his life: “Rivkin travels in Twombly’s footsteps. He conducts scenic interviews with Twombly’s son and peripheral characters (the artist’s estate did not cooperate with the book). He scrapes up what he can, but very little is new, or surprising.”
Azadeh Moaveni, Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS (Random House, 2019): “The book provides an illuminating, much-needed corrective to stock narratives, not only about the group that deliberately and deftly terrified officials and publics across the world, but also about the larger ‘war on terror’ and the often ineffective, even counterproductive policies of Western and Middle Eastern governments.”
Tony Horwitz, Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide (Penguin Press, 2019): “He wanted not only to describe the region (he succeeded in portraying both physical and cultural settings almost as well as Audubon painted birds) but also to understand the great divide in the country, hoping that understanding Southern views on slavery would allow men of good will to find common ground and a path to abolition.”
Marie Arana, Silver, Sword, and Stone: Three Crucibles in the Latin American Story (Simon & Schuster, 2019): “ . . . ‘silver,’ evoking the dependence on extractive economies focused on precious metals; ‘sword,’ referring to the tendency to embrace political power predicated on military might and the threat of violence — la mano dura, or the iron fist; and ‘stone,’ a multifaceted religious fervor that is only superficially similar to Catholic orthodoxy.”
Corey Robin, The Enigma of Clarence Thomas (Metropolitan Books, 2019): “The remarkable achievement of Robin’s thoroughly researched, cogently argued work is that it makes a compelling case for what is, initially, a startling argument. Thomas, it is well known, was a black nationalist and disciple of Malcolm X during his college years: He rejected integration and strongly believed that race and racism were immutable, that liberalism and white benevolence were emasculating forms of patronage that led to dependency, the denial of black pride and any assurance in blacks’ own achievements. All that they needed was to be left alone and guaranteed their right to be armed for self-defense.”
Melvin Konner, Believers: Faith in Human Nature (W.W. Norton & Company, 2019): “Konner refrains from offering a simple answer, which people asking questions about religion often expect. Instead, like Charles Darwin, he notes that ‘such a huge dimension of life must serve many functions.’”
Anne Sebba, Ethel Rosenberg: An American Tragedy (St. Martin’s Press, 2021): “. . . the book is a plea for Ethel the woman, an attempt to understand who she really was, to free her from the confines of the stock political figure she inevitably became.”
Laurence Jackson Hyman, ed., The Letters of Shirley Jackson (Random House, 2021): “In researching her biography, Franklin discovered a cache of letters Jackson wrote to a fan named Jeanne Beatty, whose taste in books she shared. The two never met. It’s only in reading these letters, written between 1959 and 1963, that it becomes evident how lonely Jackson was. Her confessions and enthusiasms come gushing forth as if she were a teenager who had finally, finally found a best friend.”
Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (W.W. Norton & Company, 2021): “Often, scholarly interpretation is transmitted through textbooks that oversimplify and even bore their readers with vague generalities. Far better for a large audience to learn about whiteness from a distinguished scholar in an insightful and lively exposition.”
Anthony de Palma, The Cubans: Ordinary Lives in Extraordinary Times (Viking, 2020): “America Is Obsessed With Cuba. But What Do We Know About Its Citizens?”
David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads (I.B. Tauris, 2020): “provides a superb overview of the kingdom’s political, economic and social landscape, but it goes well beyond that. Rundell explains, clearly and concisely, the special dynamics that drive the kingdom and render it so alien from our own society.”
Justine Cowan, The Secret Life of Dorothy Soames: A Memoir (Harper/HarperCollins, 2021): “Dorothy Soames — the name her mother had scribbled on a notebook — was the name that the Foundling Hospital had assigned her as an infant, so that she would completely sever her ties with the Shropshire farm girl who had reluctantly handed her over.”
Guy de la Bédoyère, Gladius: The World of the Roman Soldier (University of Chicago Press, 2021): “. . . the biggest surprise may be that the Roman Army, though hardly a hotbed of individualism, provided us with the first time in Western history that large numbers of ordinary people left records of who they were, where they came from, what they did and where they did it . . .”
Thad Ziolkowski, The Drop: How the Most Addictive Sport Can Help Us Understand Addiction and Recovery (Harper Wave, 2021): “Surfing, like being high, is feeling yourself as pure desire, floating upon a liquid wilderness and waiting for the big wave to bring you home.”
Maria Stepanova, In Memory of Memory (New Directions, 2021): “. . . any readers with a deep yearning to know more about the family who came before them will appreciate its fundamental curiosity and empathy. At its core, there is a powerful note, struck time and again, about the fleeting, mysterious nature of all lives.”
Farah Jasmine Griffin, Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature (W.W. Norton & Company, 2021): “How Literature by Black Authors Shaped One Scholar’s Life”.
Esi Edugyan, Out of the Sun: On Race and Storytelling (House of Anansi, 2021): Edugyan “explores with empathy what it means to be seen, and who remains unseen, in our current identity-conscious, visibility-obsessed culture that seems to be limping toward a new aesthetic order and politics of power.”
Samantha Hunt, The Unwritten Book: An Investigation (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022): “Here the yearning of a daughter eager to understand her father in his absence resonates. How well can one possibly know the dead — or the living, for that matter?”
Laura Trujillo, Stepping Back from the Ledge: A Daughter’s Search for Truth and Renewal (Random House, 2022): “A Daughter Tries to Make Sense of Her Mother’s Suicide”.
Ada Calhoun, Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me (Grove Press, 2022): “. . . a story about both the impossibility of reconstructing another person’s life and the importance of trying — and an investigation of the strained, complicated relationship between a creative father and daughter.”
Beverly Gage, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century (Viking, 2022): “This book doesn’t rescue Hoover’s reputation but instead complicates it, deepening our understanding of him and, by extension, the country he served.”
Richard J. Evans, Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich (Penguin Press, 2024): “‘Who were the Nazis?’ he asks in the first sentence of his preface. Were they criminals? Psychopaths? Ordinary Germans? How did seemingly respectable citizens go from rejecting the democracy of the Weimar Republic to countenancing genocide?”
Mark O’Connell, A Thread of Violence: A Story of Truth, Invention, and Murder (Doubleday, 2023): “O’Connell recorded hours of conversations with Macarthur in an effort to pierce what he calls the “sullen and persistent silence” at the heart of the case — not who did it, which was clear from the start, but why.”
Genevieve Kingston, Did I Ever Tell You?: A Memoir (S&S/Marysue Rucci Books, 2024): “. . . watching her mother spend hours assembling boxes of letters and keepsakes for her son and daughter to open on milestone days until each turned 30. ‘I began to hate the boxes,’ writes Kingston, who ached for her mother’s full attention instead. 'How could the boxes be more important to her than I was?'”
Richard J. Evans, Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich (Penguin Press, 2024): “‘Who were the Nazis?’ he asks in the first sentence of his preface. Were they criminals? Psychopaths? Ordinary Germans? How did seemingly respectable citizens go from rejecting the democracy of the Weimar Republic to countenancing genocide?”
David Sheff, Yoko: A Biography (Simon & Schuster, 2025), “argues convincingly for her as survivor, feminist, avant-gardist, political activist and world-class sass. When people criticized her for licensing ‘Instant Karma’ to Nike in 1987, she retorted, ‘I got $800,000 which went to the United Negro College Fund. … You have a problem with that?’”

Ralph Ellison was influenced by Kenneth Burke, who wrote about human motives in an attempt to understand the human condition.

Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Prentice Hall, 1945).
Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Prentice Hall, 1950).
Kenneth Burke, Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives, 1950-55 (Parlor Press, 2006).

Technical and Analytical Readings

Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity (Avery/Penguin Random House, 2015): a “sweeping history” of autism
Elizabeth Segal, Social Empathy: The Art of Understanding Others (Columbia University Press, 2018).
Sheila Redfern & Alistair Cooper, Reflective Parenting: A Guide to Understanding What's Going on in Your Child's Mind (Routledge, 2016).

Photographs

Documentary and Educational Films

Seven Up, 7 Plus Seven, 28Up, 35Up, 42Up, 49Up: this series follows British children into adulthood.

Imaginary

Fictional Narratives

"A sudden thought came into my head as I stooped towards the portal. For once, at least, I grasped the mental operations of the Morlocks. Suppressing a strong inclination to laugh, I stepped through the bronze frame and up to the Time Machine. I was surprised to find it had been carefully oiled and cleaned. I have suspected since that the Morlocks had even partially taken it to pieces while trying in their dim way to grasp its purpose. . .” [H.G. Wells, “The Time Machine” (1895).]

Novels and stories:

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1947): “The action of the novel follows his dawning awareness of his own predicament: that he is an invisible man in the eyes of those who refuse to see him as anything other than a projection of who they want or need for him to be.”
Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America: A Novel (Knopf, 2010), a fictional account of Alexis de Tocqueville's efforts at understanding American culture.
Antonya Nelson, Bound: A Novel (Bloomsbury USA, 2010), “compels you to linger, makes you take in the shimmer of the long gray highway beside the strip malls, the promise and punishment of the steely blue sky. This America is her stage, and its characters are her people. Raised in Wichita, Nelson carries regional secrets in her internal map — the nameless back roads and hidden lakes a stranger wouldn’t even know to look for.”
John Sayles, A Moment in the Sun: A Novel (McSweeney’s Books, 2011): “a distant mirror of contemporary history”.
Daniel Mason, The Winter Soldier: A Novel (Little, Brown and Company, 2018): “Lucius’ 'dream of being able to see another person’s thinking' is . . . the controlling metaphor . . .”
Helen Oyeyemi, Gingerbread: A Novel (Riverhead Books, 2019): “. . . jarring, funny, surprising, unsettling, disorienting and rewarding. It requires the reader to be quick-footed and alert. And by the end, it is clear what has grounded the story from the start — the tender and troubling humanity of its characters.”
John Grisham, A Time for Mercy: A Novel (Doubleday, 2020): “Clanton is a complicated town, a community of old grudges and deep connections driven by forces like race, class, religion, politics and family. Grisham helps us understand, if not quite sympathize with, most everyone in the book.”
Laura Lindstedt, My Friend Natalia: A Novel (Liveright, 2021): a psychologist tries to understand a difficult patient but also struggles with herself.”
Rupert Thomson, Barcelona Dreaming: A Novel (Other Press, 2021): “Thomson himself lived in Barcelona, and his book celebrates the Anglo-Catalan life of the city. Each of the stories is set in the early 2000s, and there’s a palpable sense of nostalgia suffusing the tales, looking back on a time when such cross-cultural narratives felt like part of a broader story about an open and progressive Europe of which Britain was a part.”
Colm Tóibín, The Magician: A Novel (Scribner, 2021), in this novel about novelist Thomas Mann, “Toibin seeks to grasp the entirety of Mann’s life and times, the way a biographer might . . .”
Kwon Yeo-sun, Lemon: A Novel (Other Press, 2021) “. . . by the end, the reader will know who the killer is, but that knowledge takes a back seat in this poignant tale.”
Nita Prose, The Maid: A Novel (Ballantine Books, 2022): “The reader comes to understand Molly’s worldview, and to sympathize with her longing to be accepted . . .”
Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution: A Novel (Morrow, 2022): “. . . Kukafka seems more interested in what happens when the idea of the serial killer is set aside. What questions can be asked, and what things can be seen, beyond the shadow of an entrenched construct?”
Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob: A Novel (Riverhead Books, 2022): “(Tokarczuk) passes the narrative baton from character to character in a thrilling relay of perspectives, and avails herself of diaries, letters, poetry, prophecies, and parables, as well as traditional narrative, as they suit her needs. Tokarczuk writes in the first person, the third person and the “fourth person” — another of her coinages — which means, more or less, a quasi-omniscient hovering spirit . . .” – Pulitzer Prize winner
Angie Cruz, How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water: A Novel (Flatiron Books, 2022): “In projecting Cara’s voice, Cruz prioritizes the importance of seeing an individual’s humanity even within the most impersonal of systems.”
Javier Marías, Tomás Nevinson: A Novel (Knopf, 2023): “How much can we learn about people from their daily lives? To what extent do they bear the scars of their past actions? How certain do you need to be about those actions before you condemn or intervene?”
Colson Whitehead, Crook Manifesto: A Novel (Doubleday, 2023): “he uses the crime novel as a lens to investigate the mechanics of a singular neighborhood at a particular tipping point in time. . . Structured into three time periods — 1971, 1973 and finally the year of America’s bicentennial celebration, 1976 — ‘Crook Manifesto’ gleefully detonates its satire upon this world while getting to the heart of the place and its people.”
Elizabeth O’Connor, Whale Fall: A Novel (Pantheon, 2024): “Understanding is hard work, O’Connor suggests, especially when we must release our preconceptions. While the researchers fail to grasp this, Manod does not, and her reward by book’s end, painfully earned, is a new and thrilling resolve.”
Allison Epstein, Fagin the Thief: A Novel (Doubleday, 2025): “. . . Dickens’s notorious villain emerges from this reimagining of his origins as somewhat less villainous — still a sinister master criminal, but indelibly shaped by the prejudices of 19th-century London, where even as a boy he suffers ‘the natural consequence of being visibly Jewish and visibly poor.’”

From the dark side:

He had a weak point—this Fortunato—although in other regards he was a man to be respected and even feared. He prided himself on his connoisseurship in wine. Few Italians have the true virtuoso spirit. For the most part their enthusiasm is adopted to suit the time and opportunity—to practise imposture upon the British and Austrian millionaires. In painting and gemmary, Fortunato, like his countrymen, was a quack—but in the matter of old wines he was sincere. [Edgar Allen Poe, “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846).]

Joanna Hershon, St. Ivo: A Novel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020): “The perspective focuses narrowly on Sarah’s interior, giving us intimate access to her paralyzing social anxieties and complicated marriage to Matthew.” (Two once-close couples wrestle with misunderstanding.)
Joan Didion, Miami: A Novel (Simon & Schuster, 1987): behind violence is anger and misunderstanding.
Megan Giddings, The Women Could Fly: A Novel (Amistad, 2022): “. . . the government mandates that women marry by age 30; by age 28, unmarried women must enroll in a registry. Those who resist should gear up for a future post-carceral in its complexion. The justification? Women are uniquely capable of witchcraft. What in another world might be called miracles are, here, baleful strangenesses. More quotidian phenomena are attributed to women and witchcraft too.”

Poetry

I understand the large hearts of heroes, / The courage of present times and all times, / How the skipper saw the crowded and rudderless wreck of the steamship, and Death chasing it up and down the storm, / How he knuckled tight and gave not back an inch, and was faithful of days and faithful of nights, / And chalk'd in large letters on a board, / Be of good cheer, we will not desert you; / How he follow'd with them and tack'd with them three days and would not give it up, / How he saved the drifting company at last, / How the lank loose-gown'd women look'd when boated from the side of their prepared graves, / How the silent old-faced infants and the lifted sick, and the sharp-lipp'd unshaved men; / All this I swallow, it tastes good, I like it well, it becomes mine, / I am the man, I suffer'd, I was there.

The disdain and calmness of martyrs, / The mother of old, condemn'd for a witch, burnt with dry wood, her children gazing on, / The hounded slave that flags in the race, leans by the fence, blowing, cover'd with sweat, / The twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck, the murderous buckshot and the bullets, / All these I feel or am.

I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs, / Hell and despair are upon me, crack and again crack the marksmen, / I clutch the rails of the fence, my gore dribs, thinn'd with the ooze of my skin, / I fall on the weeds and stones, / The riders spur their unwilling horses, haul close, / Taunt my dizzy ears and beat me violently over the head with whip-stocks.

Agonies are one of my changes of garments, / I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person, / My hurts turn livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe.

I am the mash'd fireman with breast-bone broken, / Tumbling walls buried me in their debris, / Heat and smoke I inspired, I heard the yelling shouts of my comrades, / I heard the distant click of their picks and shovels, / They have clear'd the beams away, they tenderly lift me forth.

. . . .

I take part, I see and hear the whole, / The cries, curses, roar, the plaudits for well-aim'd shots, / The ambulanza slowly passing trailing its red drip, / Workmen searching after damages, making indispensable repairs, / The fall of grenades through the rent roof, the fan-shaped explosion, / The whizz of limbs, heads, stone, wood, iron, high in the air.

Again gurgles the mouth of my dying general, he furiously waves with his hand, / He gasps through the clot Mind not me--mind--the entrenchments.

[Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1891-92), Book III: Song of Myself, 33.]

Other poems: