Much has been written about moving. I am not here to praise its nonexistent virtues nor to deny what we already know: chaos, disorder, not knowing where or when. But I would like to point out that inhabiting what is not yet a home involves a small disruption of the order of the world. For a time, things stop being where they belong: spoons live with novels, vases hide socks, and books end up inside the microwave. From that disorder arise unlikely encounters that, under normal circumstances, would hardly occur.
In that dance of objects, immersed in a very long and tedious move, I spent 10 days — which should have been four — living in a borrowed house. With hardly any belongings, I took the last two books that had arrived at home. One was the extraordinary Panic and Tenderness, by the Chilean philosopher Paz López. The other I did not take. It was simply there, in the outer pocket of a suitcase, without me remembering having put it there. It was the reissue of W. G. Sebald’s essays. Books, even in the middle of moves — perhaps especially in the middle of them — always end up finding you.
Since I read the question: “Where is tenderness? In the one who receives it or in the one who gives it?”, it has not stopped accompanying me
The phrase with which the back cover text of Panic and Tenderness opens also found me. It says: “Where is tenderness? In the one who receives it or in the one who gives it?”. Since I read it, the question has not stopped accompanying me. For years I thought of tenderness as a form of fragility. Something that belonged to the realm of affections, but not to that of ideas. Paz López herself also did not like to be called tender when she was a child. There lies one of the most interesting findings of the essay: questioning why a word that designates such a fundamental form of relationship has ended up seeming soft, naive, or intellectually suspicious to us.
What begins as a reflection on tenderness ends up becoming an exploration of the limits of understanding and the strange trust we have placed in one of the great moral slogans of our time: empathy. In politics, in education, in literature, we are constantly reminded of the importance of putting ourselves in the other’s place, and the idea seems so obvious that we rarely stop to examine it. That is what Paz López does: not denying the need to get closer to others, but questioning one of the most seductive promises of our time, that the suffering of others can become understandable. How many times is “I understand you” not a way of accompanying but of taking the place of the speaker. Because can we understand? And what if the other remained, to a large extent, inaccessible?
Although López quotes W. G. Sebald on several occasions, I took it as one of those reader coincidences that seem to connect books randomly. The books still occupied different places in my head. Until I got to On the Natural History of Destruction, one of the essays collected in that reissue that had appeared so improbably in the pocket of my suitcase. There, Sebald wonders how it was possible that such immense devastation as that of the German cities destroyed by Allied bombings found such a poor representation in postwar literature.
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It was then that I began to hear a conversation that had been going on for pages. Not because López and Sebald talked about the same thing, but because they share a suspicion: that there is something in suffering that resists both understanding and narrative.
There is a scene in On the Natural History of Destruction that I have not been able to get out of my head. Sebald quotes Stig Dagerman, who traveled through Germany in 1946 as a correspondent for the Swedish newspaper Expressen. On one of his train journeys, he crosses Hamburg and for 15 minutes contemplates through the window a landscape he describes as lunar: an expanse of ruins, rubble, and buildings reduced to skeletons. The train is full, as all trains in postwar Germany were, but no one looks through the windows. No one directs their gaze outside. Dagerman then understands that they recognize him as a foreigner precisely because of that: because he is looking.
Perhaps the suffering of others is not inaccessible because it is hidden, but because there is a distance that no image can abolish
The destruction was there. It was visible. It had been experienced by millions of people. And yet, something prevented truly seeing it. Or perhaps something prevented turning that vision into a narrative. Perhaps the suffering of others is not inaccessible because it is hidden, but because there is a distance that no image can abolish. The question is no longer how we tell pain, but what we do when we cannot understand it.
Paz López says that tenderness has a particular way of looking. It does not consist of closing the eyes, but of squinting them. I like the precision of the gesture because it contradicts one of the fantasies of our time: that looking better equals understanding more. Squinting is accepting a certain loss of definition. Giving up the illusion of perfect vision. I then return to the question on the back cover: where is tenderness? In the one who receives it or in the one who gives it? I would say that the place of tenderness is especially in the one who looks. Not in the one who understands nor in the one who interprets. It is in the one who looks without the desire to appropriate what they see.