The Mountain in the Sea

by Ray Nayler

“Sometimes,” the man across the table said, “I think tea is enough.” “Enough?” Rustem looked up at him. “Enough to live for. The next glass of tea. Sometimes I think it’s all that is worth living for. There are days.”

Are we trapped, then, in the world our language makes for us, unable to see beyond the boundaries of it? I say we are not. Anyone who has watched their dog dance its happiness in the sand and felt that joy themselves—anyone who has looked into a neighboring car and seen a driver there lost in thought, and smiled and seen the image of themselves in that person—knows the way out of the maze: Empathy. Identity with perspectives outside our own. The liberating, sympathetic vibrations of fellow-feeling. Only those incapable of empathy are truly caged. —Dr. Ha Nguyen, How Oceans Think