Emotions are a two-way mirror: the same device that reveals insight into ourselves, also allows us to see and understand others. Unknowingly, emotions can unveil our innermost thoughts, allowing others to perceive a sometimes clearer image of us. Yet, just like a fragile mirror, emotions are imperfect and oftentimes blurred; they can distort and blind us from larger truths. Often, we may even rely on the haziness to avoid confrontation with our true feelings. So how can the very thing that deceives us, simultaneously bring us clarity? I believe this confusion is one of the sources of humanity’s prolonged struggle with the heart. For centuries, philosophers and poets have wrestled with grasping emotions, and hundreds of theories have spiraled around each other, only furthering the chaos in trying to identify and find the meaning in each emotion. This is why the variety of literature and voices is pertinent in understanding how emotions function, working together and against one another to further complicate our understanding of the human heart. The dual function of emotion is enabling a deeper introspection, but also providing a lens into the lives of others. And it is in this complexity that we might come to fathom larger life questions and ultimately what it means to be human.

Here are 11 Pieces of Literature from which we can understand emotion:

Mark Ryan- “Self-knowledge and Liberal Education”

“It is largely through experiencing one’s own feelings and complexities, after all, that one cultivates compassion and insight into the character and personal depths of other people” (124).

Mark Ryan speaks about the downfall of Liberal education as the tendency to focus solely upon academics, and how incorporating a program into the academic system for college students that focuses on the process of self-actualization and personal development may benefit the majority’s emotional intelligence and overall well-being. He is arguing that one must look in the mirror first, before gaining understanding of others. Just as being in-tune with one’s emotions may aid the insight into the complexities of other people, the order Ryan argues may not always be the case. Sometimes, it is through observing and experiencing other people’s emotions that gives us insight into ourselves. When one is too entangled in their emotions, or fails to recognize one’s true feelings, it prohibits insight into others’ lives, and even distorts our own reality. Emotions are contradictory, they can both able and disable our ability to empathize with others. And this relates to Ryan’s case for pursuing to understand emotions, so they do not suffocate one’s perception, but rather sort and clean the mirror of emotions to fully see “the personal depths” of other people.

 Robert A.H Thurman- Anger

“The foolish are the enlightened, the self-centered, who try to run away from suffering and toward happiness, fleeting as it may always turn out to be. Addicted to their desire for pleasure, experience dissatisfaction from everything it attached to. Addicted to their dependence on anger to remove obstacles to desire, they are driven to self-destruction by following its dictates. Addicted to delusion and confusion, they constantly reinforce their sense of alienation by piling theories upon misperceptions, getting themselves more confused, more fanatical, more removed from their own common sense.”

 Similar to Mark Ryan, Thurman is advocating for the deeper consideration of one’s own emotions, specifically the harder, more burdensome ones. It is the shallow face of emotion that disconnects us from ourselves; striving for one emotion (happiness) may blind from deeper rooted emotions, which demand attention through distorting perceptions and inspiring chaos. The dependence on “delusion and confusion” further blurs the mirror, and introspection becomes distorted. It is the feelings of happiness that may mask other emotions, the fog on the mirror can be emotions themselves. Happiness is the fog one relies on to block one’s reflection of true emotion. But it is just a façade, soon it will wear off and the deeper emotions will demand to be seen.

Frederick Douglas: What to the slave is the Fourth of July?

“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelly to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.”

Frederick Douglas not only brings to light the cruelty and injustice in the current state of the nation, but how celebration can be an act of hypocrisy and a disgrace to the values the nation was founded upon. Alike to Thurman’s argument, the emotions of the nation are utilized to mask a deeper problem. They are blinded by their emotions, living in a state of denial, in a delusion of positive feelings so they may not face the harsh reality that requires accepting personal responsibility and the negative emotions that arise. To Douglas, the nation is failing to see through the mirror of emotions, they will not look at the cruelty happening before them, but rather dwell upon celebratory emotions. It is the emotions of joy, cheerfulness, pride, that blind the nations from seeing the truth behind the mirror. Mark Ryan says one’s feelings will give insight into the perplexities of others, but Douglas illustrates how emotions associated with this Holiday specifically are what block the perception into other’s lives.

James Baldwin- Sonny’s Blues

“I think I may have written Sonny the very day that little Grace was buried. I was sitting in the living room in the dark, by myself, and I suddenly thought of Sonny. My trouble made his real” (127).

 In James Baldwin’s story, the narrator has just lost his little girl, and writes his brother Sonny whom he is disconnected with over a series of disagreements, rooted in lack of understanding. It was the narrator’s grieving heart and painful emotions that helped him empathize and understand Sonny better. It was through experiencing his own suffering, and deep emotion that enabled him to reflect upon and recognize his brother’s pain, even though the types of suffering were very different. Throughout the story, the narrator is stuck reflecting upon his own emotions- frustration, anger, disappointment- to ever listen to Sonny, and seek to understand. The narrator relied on his anger, which blinded him from empathizing with Sonny. Yet, in this section, he is finally able to see through the other side of the mirror of his emotions and begin to understand Sonny.

 Herman Melville- Bartleby

 “My first emotions had been those of pure melancholy and sincerest pity; but just in proportion as the forlornness of Bartleby grew and grew to my imagination, did that same melancholy merge into fear, that pity into repulsion. So true it is, and so terrible too, that up to a certain point the thought or sight of misery enlists our best affections; but, in certain special cases, beyond that point it does not. They err who would assert that invariably this is owing to the inherent selfishness of the human heart. It rather proceeds from a certain hopelessness of remedying excessive and organic ill. To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain. And when at last it is perceived that such pity cannot lead to effectual succor, common sense bids the soul rid of it. What I saw that morning persuaded me that the scrivener was the victim of innate and incurable disorder. I might give alms to his body; but his body did not pain him; it was his soul that suffered, and his soul I could not reach.” (20).

In context of the story, the narrator has just moved on through a cycle of feeling sorrow and pity for Bartleby, and is frustrated by his inactions. The fluctuation of emotion the narrator feels towards Bartleby shifts, and he no longer feels he can empathize, blaming the “inherent selfishness of the human heart”. The narrator is another example of getting caught on one side of the mirror, his own emotions and selfishness inhibit him from seeing through and understanding Bartleby. Making an assertion that the man cannot be helped, the narrator justifies his retreating efforts and repulsion with Bartleby. Just as the Mother in Hemingway’s story, he is blinded by his selfish feelings of frustration to truly attempt to understand the complexities of Bartleby, and instead diagnoses him as “incurable”.

 Ernest Hemingway- A Soldier’s Home

 “I’ve worried about you so much, Harold,’ his mother went on. ‘I know the temptations you must have been exposed to. I know how weak men are.” (75)

In Hemingway’s short story, Harold struggles to assimilate back into normal life after the war, while still living at home but refusing to work. His mother becomes anxious and worried about his stagnation, and in this conversation her emotions give her a false sense of empathy. Her worry, anxiety, sadness over her son’s condition leads to an insufficient attempt to empathize with him, because ultimately she has no idea what he’s actually going through. Her emotions deceive her sense of understanding; her worry is what drives her assumptions of the cause of his pain. Since her emotions cloud her perception of him, she is unable to truly understand him, much like the brother in “Sonny’s Blues” and Bartleby. Again she is caught on one side of the mirror, with the same effect as Plutarch describes Anger has on one’s perception.

 Greg Boyle- Tattoos on the Heart

“Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a covenant between equals. Al Sharpton always says, “We’re all created equal, but we don’t all end up equal. Compassion is always, at its most authentic, about a shift from the cramped world of self-preoccupation into a more expansive place of fellowship, of true kinship.” (77)

 In Greg Boyle’s story, a gangster named Anthony is transformed through his new occupation as a mechanic, with Dennis, the car mechanic’s help. Boyle portrays compassion as a level playing field, one must come as an equal in order to extend this relationship. In order to see from the other side of the mirror into other’s perspectives, one must first grapple with the emotions that sustain self-preoccupation. Alike the mother in Hemingway, the narrator in Bartleby, and Sonny’s brother, emotions can trap us in a selfish mind frame, stuck at the mirror, looking at ourselves, but never seeing through. Boyle is highlighting that these feelings must be knocked down in order for us to see others as “equals”, not only changing our perception of those around us and understanding them better, but also requiring a necessary shift of perspective within ourselves. 

Plutarch- “On the Control of Anger”

“Surely we should allow no place to anger even in jest, for that brings enmity in where friendliness was; nor in learned discussions, for that turns love of learning into strife; nor when rendering judgement, for that adds insolence to authority; nor in teaching, for that engenders disappointment and hatred of learning; nor in prosperity, for that increases envy; nor in adversity, for that drives away compassion when men become irritable and quarrel with those who sympathize with them....”

Speaking on anger, Plutarch argues its’ dominant control upon human consciousness. Anger not only manipulates other emotions, but infiltrates other areas of life. Even speaking on how anger blocks compassion and sympathy, the emotion inhibits a shift in perspective. This destructive emotion veils one’s perception of life, and unlike Thurman’s burying of emotions, a covert, subtle influence opposed to this case emphasizes the overt influence of emotion on daily life. But both cases anger dominates, and it festers within one’s soul and wreaks havoc without prevention.

 Thomas Paine- Reflections on Unhappy Marriages

“But, still like their first parents, they no sooner taste the tempting fruit; but their eyes are opened: the folly of their intemperance becomes invisible; shame succeeds first, and then repentance; but sorrow for themselves soon returns to anger with the innocent cause of their unhappiness. Hence flow bitter reproaches, and keen incentives, which end in mutual hatred and contempt. Love abhors clamor and soon flies away, and happiness finds no entrance when love is gone.”

 Thomas Paine explains why divorce laws are necessary, because many marriages turn bitter once the romantic feelings dwindle. Speaking to the deceptive nature of romantic emotions, the feelings distort the perception of the other person as well as the self. We can be fooled by the mirror, and love is notorious for clouding the surface of our emotions. Paine outlines the negative emotions that follow once the veil of lofty, romantic feelings falls and bitter reality stings the young couple. In addition to the deceiving nature of emotions that Douglas, Melville, and Thurman point out, some emotions are not to be trusted and can block us from empathizing with others: especially anger once the relationship turns sour. In this case, emotions can trick us and veil the perception of others in a pure light, which is eventually torn off by bitter emotions once the love “flies away”.

 Anna Deavere Smith- Twilight: “Swallowing the Bitterness” Mrs. Young-soon Han:

 “I waseh swallowing the bitternesseh, sitting here alone and watching them. They became all hilarious and, uh, in a way I was happy for them. At leasteh they got something back, you know. Lets just forget Korean Victims or other victims who are destroyed by them.”

 Mrs. Young-Soon Han has “mixed feelings” about the verdict, when everyone was celebrating that justice was served, yet her minority was still forgotten about. She juxtaposes her emotions on the situation, and in her words, but more evident in Smith’s acting out of the scene, she is audibly upset and her voice trembles with resentment. Her emotions do give her a better sense of the injustice that still exists in society, and her feelings of joy for the other minorities creates a dissonance within her. She goes on to say even though she can relate to their suffering, she is still upset because the injustice still isn’t solved, she can’t even associate with Blacks because the “fire is still there”. In one sense, the emotions that she’s experienced through discrimination enable her to empathize and be happy for the other minorities, yet she also feels a sense of indignation because her minority is still facing injustice and discrimination.

J.D Salinger- Catcher in the Rye

 “Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.”

 We make sense of how we feel, our deep assortment of emotions in context of history: in relating to and empathizing with people who have felt the same as us. In turn, it may give us more insight into ourselves. We learn how to feel by watching others, interpreting them, and gauging reactions. Emotions may help us understand ourselves, but it is through other people’s emotions that we gain insight and mutual understanding, and ultimately gaining a distinct comfort in knowing we are not alone.