Here is the mathematical logic of the spirit: If love is the quality of attention we pay something other than ourselves and hate is the veil of not understanding ourselves, then loving the world more — the other word for which is kindness — is largely a matter of deepening our awareness and sharpening our attention on both sides of the skin that membranes the self.

George Saunders — whose gorgeous novels and essays are a kind of jungle gym for playing with your assumptions rigorously and sensitively enough to grow the agility of perspective called empathy — explores this equivalence with his characteristic precision of mind and grandeur of heart in a wonderful interview on The Daily.

A practicing Buddhist and a writer whose core subject is how to love the world more, Saunders considers the parallels between Buddhism and writing as instruments of kindness honed on awareness and attention:

We have thoughts and they self-generate and dominate us. We mistake those thoughts for us. In both Buddhist practice and writing, you have a chance to go, Oh, those are just brain farts. They’re just happening spontaneously, and I didn’t actually create them, and I’m not sure I really want to take ownership of them. At the same time, they’re affecting my body. So you have to just get clear for long enough to recognize them as being separate from who you actually are.

Kindness, he observes in reconsidering his now-classic 2013 meditation on the subject, is something both greater than and simpler than niceness — a stilling of that “monkey mind” just long enough to consider what is most helpful to the other in a given situation. (Few things are more moving in this culture of opinions tattooed on the skin of the self than to see a person change their mind or evolve their perspective in public.)

Literature, Saunders insists, can quiet our habitual thoughts just enough to invite “a little more empathy, a little more engagement, a little more patience,” effecting “incremental changes of consciousness on the part of the writer and the reader” — changes that have to do with unclenching the fist of story and certainty that is the self and hold out to the world the open palm of curiosity. He identifies three awarenesses we must eventually attain in order to wake up from the core delusions that keep our lives clenched, that stand between us and kindness:

You’re not permanent.

You’re not the most important thing.

You’re not separate.

There are Buddhist precepts, but they are also the rewards of great literature — something Saunders captures beautifully in his introduction to the collected stories, essays, and poems of one of his own favorite writers, Grace Paley:

A great writer mimicking, on the page, the dynamic energy of human thought is as about as close as we can get to modeling pure empathy.

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The world has no need to be represented: there it is, all around us, all the time. What it needs is to be loved better. Or maybe, what we need is to be reminded to love it and to be shown how, because sometimes, busy as we get trying to stay alive, loving the world slips our mind.

Showing us how has been his life’s work, whether or not Saunders realized it along the way — we are always insensible to our own becoming, bud blind to blossom. Two decades before he came to the question of kindness directly, he shone a sidewise gleam at its substrate — the relationship between storytelling and unselfing — in his prescient 2007 essay collection The Brainded Megaphone.

Given that narrative is the neurocognitive pillar of identity, the story we tell ourselves about who we are comes to shape who we act ourselves into being, who we become in relation to the world. This fundamental vulnerability of consciousness, Saunders observes, can be and is exploited, but it is also what gives storytelling its transformative power:

In the beginning, there’s a blank mind. Then that mind gets an idea in it, and the trouble begins, because the mind mistakes the idea for the world. Mistaking the idea for the world, the mind formulates a theory and, having formulated a theory, feels inclined to act… Because the idea is always only an approximation of the world, whether that action will be catastrophic or beneficial depends on the distance between the idea and the world. Mass media’s job is to provide this simulacra of the world, upon which we build our ideas. There’s another name for this simulacra-building: storytelling.

The point, of course, is that beneath the constructed idea is the world itself, just as beneath the self — the scaffolding of ideas upon which we construct our experience of reality — is the soul, that loose and baggaged word we use to hold something immense and pure: the elemental essence of being. In our culture, there is no greater courage than to strip the armor of ready-made answers and face the world as naked soul, blank as a question; to discover rather than dictate who we are and what this is — this brief burst of astonishment and anguish that we share before we return our borrowed stardust to the universe, wasted if seduced by certainty, wasted if shorn of kindness.

Saunders offer the simple, intensely difficult remedy:

Don’t be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die.

The great writer’s gift to the reader are not better answers but better questions, a greater tolerance for uncertainty, a mechanism of transmuting confusion into kindness, and at the same time a way of seeing the world more clearly in order to love it more deeply. I find Saunders’s generous words about Grace Paley to apply perfectly to his own writing:

Reading Paley will, I predict, make you better understand the idea that love is attention and vice versa.

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What does a writer leave behind? Scale models of a way of seeing and thinking.

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Paley’s model advises us to suffer less by loving more — love the world more, and each other more—and then she gives us a specific way to love more: see better. If you only really see this world, you will think better of it, she seems to say. And then she gives us a way to see better: let language sing, sing precisely, and let it off the tether of the mundane, and watch the wonderful truth it knows how to make.