by Alizah Holstein
Once upon a time, summer meant windows thrown open, midnight breezes, the cooing of doves at dawn. Now, though, the panes have fallen. My family has at long last joined the approximately ninety percent of American households with access to air conditioning. Statistically speaking, it’s possible we had already joined that number: for the past four years, window units have cooled two of our three bedrooms when necessary. But the kitchen remained hot, the dining room sticky, the third-floor offices all but unusable for four or five months of the year.
I will not mince words: after years of resisting systemic cooling, I concede it’s a profound relief. I’m comfortable, sleeping well, and feeling productive. Just days into our new arrangement, I already regard my life as divided into two distinct eras: BCE (Before Conditioning Era) and CE (Conditioning Era). In the period from 50 BCE, when I was born, to approximately 20 BCE, summer temperatures in New England and the mid-Atlantic were often hot but rarely unbearable. But from 20 BCE on, summer days, and even autumn ones, have grown hotter and more humid. Now even nights can be tough to bear. When I sauntered out at 7:45 one morning last month to walk my dog, the temperature was 80 degrees Fahrenheit with 92% humidity—a combination one might resent even at the height of day. But of course, it was just the start of it.
And yet for all its pleasures, I partake in this new era with some misgivings. In part my hesitation is personal because some things I enjoy about summer are inevitably now less noticeable to me: a sudden gust of wind; the smell of grass; the sounds of children playing outside. As for my own kids, I don’t want them to grow up oblivious to the outside world as they move between one anodyne climate-controlled indoor space and another. Nor do I believe it’s in their best interest to come to expect comfort at all times. But I worry that I, too, might come to expect it.
And then there are the dimensions to my concern whose ramifications extend beyond the personal. The climate change that fuels the need for cooling is an obvious example. But the dimension I’m thinking of now is awareness. When we close our windows, we deprive ourselves of the sense recognition of all that lies just outside our windows: the robins building a nest in the oak branches, the squirrels pattering atop the fence; the fresh scent of rain borne on the wind. One could easily dismiss these as “just” aesthetics, but to do so you must willingly forget that aesthetics lie at the core of politics. What we notice becomes what we care about.
As I write this now, I see that a storm might be brewing. The oak branches outside my window are swaying, but I can’t sense the wind that’s moving them. I long to raise the pane, but not wishing to waste the cool air, I don’t.
What happens when we cease to notice? One day last summer I became alarmed when an acrid odor wafted in through my windows. I ran outside to search for the fire but found nothing. When I rang the bell at the houses of a few neighbors, I found that no one else had noticed it. Their homes are air conditioned; their windows were closed. One friend, a reporter, turned to social media and learned that the local scrap metal yard, less than three miles away, was ablaze. For a few days, the air quality in my (mostly white, mostly affluent) neighborhood fell noticeably. In the (racially diverse, mostly poor) neighborhood of our city where the fire blazed, it plummeted precipitously, and to dangerous levels. How many of my neighbors ever knew of what took place? Now that I am one of them, writing from inside my own closed container, how much more will escape my notice?
“One Half the World does not know how the other Half lives,” Benjamin Franklin, possibly quoting Rabelais, once wrote. The printer-philosopher-statesman was famously learned and enjoyed a career in which his talent and knowledge were in continuous demand. But as historian Jill Lepore explores in a moving essay, Benjamin had a sister, Jane. Her world, confined to the small and domestic, could not have been more different from his. She was an intelligent woman who had been made to marry exceptionally young, birthed twelve children, and despite her ambitions, was barely educated to read or write. Their bond was one of mutual affection. She was his sister, but he didn’t know, not really, how she and her half lived. She existed on the other side of a window that was mostly closed.
One of Benjamin Franklin’s other halves was Jane Franklin Mecom. But we can have many other halves: the neighborhoods of our city we never find reason to visit, the natural world to which we pretend not to belong, the swaths of humanity with whom we believe we have nothing in common—anything and everything that lies beyond the walls we place around our lives and minds. I’ve been writing about awareness, but really we’re entering into the territory of empathy. As a concept, empathy is young. It first appeared in print in the early 1870s, when German theorist Robert Vischer coined the term Einfühlung (“feeling into”) to explain how viewers of architecture project their own bodily sense onto structures. And so: a spire “soars,” an arch is seen as two outstretched arms in a poised embrace, a niche “receives” the viewer. It would be thirty years before Einfühlung was translated into English, first as “aesthetic sympathetic feeling,” and then, a decade later, in the mid-1910s, as “empathy.”
Many of us live ever more comfortably—something that while improving our lives in an immediate sense, can prove detrimental to us in other ways. We fail to perceive the gathering storm. The fire that has harmed our neighbors escapes our notice. How much can we feel into our world, into its many and various other halves, when our windowpanes are closed?
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