You Don’t Have to Carry the Entire Planet on Your Shoulders

Hold on to your handkerchief

Jonah and the Whale by Pieter Lastman, 1621

I know a lot of things. Far more than anyone could have known in times past. News stories are no longer distant rumors in scribbled letters from some unreachable, irrelevant corner. It’s whispers in my ear, urging me to pay attention to this planet I inhabit. TV shrinks it in half; the internet, tenfold. I know a lot of things, for my eyes enjoy the vantage point of modernity. This planet feels small, but it’s huge. So vast in shape, color, and texture that trying to hold it all in my mind gives me a headache. I know a lot of things, so my head hurts. We Spaniards say “el mundo es un pañuelo” (“the world is a handkerchief”) when we run into someone we used to know at an unexpected place. But only in the last few decades has this metaphor of smallness become a tangible reality: we’re literally trying to fit the world in a screen the size of a handkerchief. And a handkerchief it is, since all it seems to do is soak up the tears of those who watch and watch and watch the horrors unfolding here and there.

But how could I say no? How could I deny the news coming from Palestine, or Ukraine, or India, or sub-Saharan Africa, or the mafia-ridden outposts of Latin America, or the drought-cracked lands of the Maghreb, or the hurricane-battered islands of the Caribbean, the space it…