How to See Others

The answer to the perennial question of how to be a better person might lie in how we see — or fail to see — others.

In her wonderfully challenging novel Nonfiction, Julie Myerson’s narrator gives a book reading at which one of her school teachers turns up to listen. She sits in the audience with the implacable expression of certain veteran teachers, “a small frown between her brows”. Her face is so etched with judgment that the narrator loses her confidence and, much like a schoolchild made to read out out a section of assigned text in front of her class, she stumbles over her words. Finally, the reading ends, and the teacher immediately leaves without a look or word offered. “I was surprised,” the narrator says, watching the old woman walk away, “by how diminished I felt.”

Who knows — truly knows — how much we affect another’s life? We rarely fathom to its deepest place how much happiness or sadness, how much affirmation or diminishment, we can give to another person in the simplest of things: a smile, a kind word, a shrug, a frown. Often, we are seeking what David Foster Wallace describes as “raw,…