Every act of learning is an act of intellectual appropriation, incorporating someone else’s knowledge into your own mental library. Every act of empathy is an act of emotional appropriation, modeling the reality of another into your own in order to fathom it. I have appropriated the English language — not my native — in order to write these words.

The tyranny of our time is that, because the hero of the modern myth is the victim, our catalogue of ways to be wounded has swelled to untenable proportions. The arsenal of possible offenses is so immense that we are left in a state of paralyzing hyper-vigilance, ever on the defensive, ever trying to preempt grievance and avoid indictment. Because it is hard to create from a defensive place, no region of life has suffered more by this than our arts — trembling before the whip of cultural appropriation, artists are left with narrower and narrower parameters of permission for whom and what they can imagine. We seem to have forgotten that the word empathy itself is just a little over a century old, invented by Rilke and Rodin to describe the imaginative act of projecting yourself into a work of art that represents something other than yourself. We seem to have forgotten that, at its best, art is not a mirror but a kaleidoscope, casting on the walls of our own lives a thousand hues of experience we never could have lived. As a little girl in the mountains of Bulgaria in the early 1990s, I would have never known what it is like to be a little boy in the prairies of North America in the early 1900s had I not read a German woman’s novel about a Lakota father and son. You may never know what it is like to be the long-suffering wife of a Siberian serf, but you have Dostoyevsky.

Troubled by this tyrannical paralysis, Zadie Smith offers an antidote of uncommon potency and poignancy in one of the essays collected in Dead and Alive (public library), anchored in a recognition of the absurdity of turning identities into warfare given how mutable the self is, how inconstant, how tessellated a thing to begin with. She writes:

I’ve always been aware of being an inconsistent personality. Of having a lot of contradictory voices knocking around my head. As a kid, I was ashamed of it. Other people seemed to feel strongly about themselves, to know exactly who they were. I was never like that. I could never shake the suspicion that everything about me was the consequence of a series of improbable accidents — not least of which was the 400-trillion-to-one accident of my birth. As I saw it, even my strongest feelings and convictions might easily be otherwise, had I been the child of the next family down the hall, or the child of another century, another country, another God.

An epoch after Walt Whitman — a person utterly unlike her by all the unchosen variables we mistake for personhood — celebrated his contradictory multitudes, she considers the making of her own, borrowed from the lives of others, real and imagined:

I rarely entered a friend’s home without wondering what it might be like to never leave. That is, what it would be like to be Polish or Ghanaian or Irish or Bengali, to be richer or poorer, to say these prayers or hold those politics. I was an equal-opportunity voyeur. I wanted to know what it was like to be everybody. Above all, I wondered what it would be like to believe the sorts of things I didn’t believe… And what I did in life, I did with books. I lived in them and felt them live in me. I felt I was Jane Eyre and Celie and Mr Biswas and David Copperfield. Our autobiographical coordinates rarely matched. I’d never had a friend die of consumption or been raped by my father or lived in Trinidad or the Deep South or the nineteenth century. But I’d been sad and lost, sometimes desperate, often confused. It was on the basis of such flimsy emotional clues that I found myself feeling with these imaginary strangers: feeling with them, for them, alongside them and through them, extrapolating from my own emotions, which, though strikingly minor when compared to the high dramas of fiction, still bore some relation to them, as all human feelings do. The voices of characters joined the ranks of all the other voices inside me, serving to make the idea of my “own voice” indistinct. Or maybe it’s better to say: I’ve never believed myself to have a voice entirely separate from the many voices I hear, read, and internalize every day.

But if the purpose of art is to offer us, in Iris Murdoch’s perfect phrase, “an occasion for unselfing,” then it is not a defect but a natural advantage for an artist to have so unbounded a self, to be so indiscriminately curious about the interiority of other lives, about even the remotest reaches of possible experience. She offers an alternative to our culture’s antagonistic model of interpersonal curiosity:

What would our debates about fiction look like, I sometimes wonder, if our preferred verbal container for the phenomenon of writing about others was not “cultural appropriation” but rather “interpersonal voyeurism” or “profound other-fascination” or even “cross-epidermal reanimation”? Our discussions would still be vibrant, perhaps even still furious — but I’m certain they would not be the same. Aren’t we a little too passive in the face of inherited concepts? We allow them to think for us, and to stand as place markers when we can’t be bothered to think… I do believe a writer’s task is to think for herself, although this task, to me, signifies not a fixed state but a continual process: thinking things afresh, each time, in each new situation. This requires not a little mental flexibility. No piety of the culture… should or ever can be entirely fixed in place or protected from the currents of history. There is always the potential for radical change.

Invoking Whitman’s timeless exhortation to “re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book [and] dismiss whatever insults your own soul,” she adds:

Full disclosure: what insults my soul is the idea — popular in the culture just now, and presented in widely variant degrees of complexity — that we can and should write only about people who are fundamentally “like” us: racially, sexually, genetically, nationally, politically, personally. That only an intimate authorial autobiographical connection with a character can be the rightful basis of a fiction. I do not believe that. I could not have written a single one of my books if I did.

What a lovely reminder that art’s invitation to imagine what it is like to be another is precisely what allows us to discover the doom and glory of who we are and what we are. What a lovely insistence that far greater than the courage to be yourself is the courage to be more-than-yourself, the courage to remember that but a thin veil woven of chance events stretching all the way back to the Big Bang falls between you and not-you, a veil we have found a way of parting — literature — in order to allay the fundamental loneliness, isolation, and plain tedium of the self.