Edward Wiesen

One interesting thing about people and the way we interact with them is that we all have a different mask we put on for every situation. The “me” that orders my lunch every day is not the same as the “me” that spends time with my sister watching trashy TV, and it’s not the same as the “me” that sits in class, trying to pay attention but secretly drifting off to somewhere else entirely. Each one of those “me’s” is a different person, one who would respond in different ways to the same questions, ranging from distant politeness to sarcasm to rushed reassurances. In “The Empathy Exams,” we mainly meet two different people; we meet the Leslie Jamison who pretends to feel sick because that is her job, and we meet the Leslie Jamison that is anxious and confused about some very frightening things that have happened to her. There is a sharp line between the Jamison that describes the oddities of her job and the Jamison that imparts very intimate knowledge about a hugely personal topic, and the differences in tone between these two parts is very clear. But they are still linked together in writing by the use of the medical acting scripts; Jamison using these for both the patients she pretends to be and the patient she actually was draws a clear line between the two. What Jamison is paid to look for in these medical students is what she wants most when she is going through a crisis herself, but both in her work and in regards to her abortion and heart surgery, nobody is really sure how to really be empathetic, and nobody does it the same way. There are medical students who say things that are supposed to be comforting but aren’t, and there is Jamison’s boyfriend Dave who doesn’t believe in sharing emotions but still attempts to numb her pain. For Jamison, even though she is two completely different personas, both the actor and the writer ultimately want the same things.

“If you were to glance out one day and see a row of mushroom clouds rising on the horizon, you would know at once that what you were seeing, remarkable as it was, was intrinsically not worth remarking. No use running to tell anyone. Significant as it was, it did not matter a whit. For what is significance? It is significance for people. No people, no significance. This is all I have to tell you.”

To Dillard, viewing the solar eclipse isn’t just a thing that occurs to her; it is an event that shapes her way of thinking in profound and occasionally bizarre ways.  She finds herself traveling back in time, experiencing the eclipse the way an earlier civilization with no concept of astronomy would, and with that mindset, seeing the sun slowly disappear from the sky is terrifying.  The eclipse is not the only thing that she has seen that has impacted her life (Dillard remarks that even something as innocuous as the painting in her hotel room has stuck with her for years) but it is something that has allowed her to form a completely new way of thinking about things, as strange as that new way of thinking may be.

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