DISCOVERIES

Field Notes on the Compassionate Life

A Search for the Soul of Kindness

Marc Ian Barasch

Rodale: 352 pp., $24.95

The beauty of this book is that just by opening the thing you are stepping down a thought-path that Marc Ian Barasch, in his infinite wisdom, allows to meander through the halls of hospitals, academia, institutes in the wild backwoods of America and other byways.

What good is kindness? How to be kind? Are humans hard-wired for kindness or for aggression? How are we evolving? Barasch does some thinking about people he’s been inspired by, about acts of kindness that have changed his life and about his own efforts to deal with friends and strangers in need. He also writes about people he’s met who make compassion their life’s work, such as the Dalai Lama. He visits the Yerkes National Primate Research center, outside Atlanta, where Frans de Waal and other scientists conduct groundbreaking work on the social habits of bonobos (the Gandhis of the simian world), with whom we share 99.4% of our DNA, and the University of Georgia’s Language Research Center -- visits that increased Barasch’s faith in the basic goodness of our nature. He talks with researchers at the National Institutes of Health who study “mirror neurons,” which cause cells to “light up” not just when one’s own finger is jabbed with a pin but when someone else’s is jabbed as well. He visits children with Williams’ (or “elfin face”) syndrome, who exhibit various learning disabilities but also an acute friendliness and empathy -- in effect, notes Barasch, the opposite of Asperger’s syndrome. He forgoes a week in Provence to go on a Street Retreat run by the Zen Peacemaker Order, whose participants learn what it’s like to be homeless. He visits the Institute of HeartMath, where scientists study the many influences of the heart on the brain (including the correspondence between heart rate and emotional states), and is hooked up to a computer game that, rather than rewarding aggression, trains the player to light up the screen by thinking thoughts that cause the heart to open. At the Institute of Noetic Sciences, in Petaluma, Calif., Barasch, attached to electrodes, investigates the effects of compassion and love on the sheer energy in a room and its ability to travel between two people in separate buildings. He visits a murderer in Georgia’s Telfair State Prison, a Rwandan refugee, a camp for Middle Eastern teenagers struggling to forgive their enemies, a group of scientists sending kindly messages into outer space. He is led to conclude, after all his travels, “that maybe we are more than just connected; maybe we are saturated with each other.... I know for a plausible fact that people do change for the better and incrementally change others.” Compassion is “brought forth by a certain exertion, as butter emerges from milk by the labor of the churn.”

*

Old Mr. Flood

Joseph Mitchell

MacAdam/Cage: 120 pp., $15

“Old Mr. Flood,” a compilation of stories that Joseph Mitchell hoped would be “truthful rather than factual,” though they are “solidly based on facts,” was first published in the 1940s. Mr. Flood, a self-described “seafoodetarian,” is 93 and hopes to live to 115 (until 1965), to prove to the world the healthful benefits of a pure seafood diet. And he is fierce in his opinions on how it should be prepared: The cook must be old, for one thing, because “it takes almost a lifetime to learn how to do a thing simply. Even the stove has to be old.” And no fancy herbs or sauces: no “boolybooze” (bouillabaise) to please the “goormys” (gourmets). Mr. Flood, a retired demolition contractor, lives in Hartford House, near the Fulton Fish Market, with a few dozen “elderly mariners” and “mythomaniacs.” For all ailments, including an occasional “katzenjammer” (hangover -- Mr. Flood believes in whiskey), Mr. Flood eats raw oysters. Mr. Flood, like many of the characters Mitchell wrote about in the New Yorker, conveys in his very being the aura of old New York. “I’m an old-time New Yorker,” he says in a rare moment when he’s not talking about seafood, “the melting-pot type, the Tammany type before Tammany went to seed, all for one, one for all, a man’s race and color is his own business.” Mr. Flood is unforgettable.