The Empathy Exams

by Leslie Jamison

This is the grand fiction of tourism, that bringing our bodies somewhere draws that place closer to us, or we to it. It’s a quick fix of empathy.

You can find a program on the Internet called “Digital Propp.” I guess you’d call it a game. You click on the site and it says: “You have reached the Proppian Fairy Tale Generator, an experiment in electronic (re)writing and an exploration of the retranslation of modernist theory within the electronic environment.

“Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country,” writes Susan Sontag, “is a quintessential modern experience.” Part of what feels strange about this tour is that you’re assuming the posture of a tourist—How many people have died here? How do the boys come of age?—but you are only eighteen miles from where you grew up.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion wrote, meaning frightened people need motives. Meaning everyone does.