"To Get a Feel for What This Means": Annie Dillard's Thought Experiments and the Quest to Understand Compassion

Annie Dillard has spent much of her career meditating on the psychological challenges we face, as humans, when we seek to be concerned, engaged citizens—to feel compassion for other living beings, human and nonhuman. This essay applies a cluster of psychological concepts often described as the "arithmetic of compassion" to explain the series of compassion-related thought experiments Dillard offers in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, "Living Like Weasels," and For the Time Being, among other works. The goal of such experiments is not so much to display the author's compassion or evoke the reader's compassion as it is to explore the psychological mystery of compassion and, in most cases, to demonstrate humans' inability to truly achieve compassion for the other, despite our fascination with this possibility.