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The equation gets more complicated. Donne liked to think that everyone represented a world within himself. When anyone died, a planet died; messages of condolence should be flashed across the galaxy. All this intricate imagery simply provided a hard shell for soft feelings. In The Third Man, Harry Lime peered down from the top of a Ferris wheel at the dotlike people below, and asked who would really care if one of those dots were to stop moving. Donne saw the dots as close relatives.
For most people the difficulty may lie not in giving dollars or a moment's sympathy to a distant tragedy but in feeling a part of the world in the first place. Show me an Ethiopian mother holding her skin-sore baby-belly ballooned, limbs like an insect's-and my eyes will spill tears. Naturally. What do you take me for? But ask that I see the Ethiopian mother when she is off the screen, in the caves of my mind when I am about my business... ah, well. Donne's thesis was that human sympathy ought not to be what we dust off occasionally but what we display all the time. Thus would we weep not only for death at a distance but for the sufferers who are closer at hand, for the family down the street whose plight goes unnoticed and untelevised-for all those in fact whom we might actually help.
Thus, too, would we be prepared for history's surprises, so that when the species goes berserk and comes up with a Hitler or a Pol Pot, we would not turn our backs on those in danger. In his book Language and Silence, George Steiner was perplexed to consider how the torture-murders committed at Treblinka could be occurring at precisely the same time that people in New York were making love or going to the movies. Were there two kinds of time in the world, Steiner wondered-"good times" and "inhuman time"? The matter was troubling and confusing: "This notion of different orders of time simultaneous but in no effective analogy or communication may be necessary to the rest of us, who were not there, who lived as if on another planet. That, surely, is the point: to discover the relations between those done to death and those alive then, and the relations of both to us."
But it may not be enough to establish a relationship between those done to death and the survivors. It may be necessary to make a connection with all those who die, under any circumstances-any man's death, at any time-in order to keep one's capacity for sympathy vigilant. There may not be two kinds of time in the world, but there seem to be two kinds of sympathy: one that weeps and disappears, and one that never leaves the watch. Sympathy, unlike pity, must have some application to the future. If we do not feel deeply the deaths we are powerless to prevent, how would we be alert to the deaths we might put an end to?