My police neighbor

I was pondering what to write for the article I had to submit to the newspaper, when a number I didn't recognize called me: it turned out to be an inspector from the city council who was coming to check the renovations in the apartment where I live because a neighbor had reported noise. I could stretch out the anecdote, but I prefer to leave it here. The thing is that this neighbor had already complained, when the renovations started, because the noise bothered her, and I tried to explain to her that I wasn't exactly thrilled about the renovations either, and that I would do everything possible to make them finish as quickly as possible. "You could finish them in August, which is when I go on vacation". But it turns out that she is not the only one on vacation in August. I imagine she has returned from the beach, recognized the commotion, and even though there are permits and work is being done during the hours established by law, instead of knocking on the door and talking it over, she preferred to report it. Legitimate. I do not want to try to make any poetry out of this case, nor elevate it to a generic reflection, even though I am tempted to. A neighbor explained to me that a few years ago she had done renovations at home, so I imagine that, at some point, someone suffered the noise that she now finds unbearable. But people forget about these things. She must also have forgotten that when someone does any kind of repair at home, whether it be changing the windows, replacing the doors, or painting the walls, a kind of mythical and unavoidable anguish appears, The Ghost of Renovation, with whom you will have to battle for an indeterminate amount of time, a specter constituted by uncertainty, exhaustion, and money that disappears as if your pockets had been pierced. It is the law of life. But about these things, of course, people forget.

It is also lazy that the neighbor opts for the path of control and, ultimately, punitivism, rather than preferring to talk, comment, converse, try to understand, to dialogue. But it is also a law of life: the worst thing about renovations is the neighbors, a somewhat sorrowful conclusion, but true enough. I said I didn't want to elevate the anecdote, because we have all had unbearable and policing neighbors, whose blood boils at the slightest thing, especially in the post-covid era, which served for so many to discover the little police officer they carried inside (not to mention the fascist that inhabited them), but I would be lying if I didn't explain that, when I received the call, I thought of a book by Paul Bloom that I read a couple of years ago, which essentially says that one of the evils of our time is not that we have lost empathy, but that we have become experts at cultivating a selective one. This means that we feel empathy when we want and in relation to whom we want, not as a quality that runs through us, but as a strategic political tool, and it is awakened in us in a tribal way and often captured by identities. Accurate. It is impossible not to evoke the beautiful conference that Foster Wallace delivered in 2005 at Kenyon College, This Is Water, oracular and premonitory: compassion, he said, is not a virtue to be preached in naive terms; it is, rather, about working on the capacity to not be a deeply egocentric person and to stop interpreting absolutely everything through one's own lens. The world is much wider than the discomfort you feel right now. Life is more complex than the noise of these cursed construction works that annoy you so much. What the psychologist and the writer have to say is quite similar: being empathetic, which I assume is one of the foundations of life in common, is not about turning on a spotlight that illuminates only one's own tribe (as Bloom would say) or trying to attend only to one's own discomfort (as Foster Wallace would say). And I do not intend to elevate empathy to the tool through which to make moral judgments: the two texts I cite are more complex and rich, and they also digress on how empathy can be a double-edged sword, dangerous and utilitarian. All in all, it is a pity that my neighbor has not thought that perhaps she, too, one day made noise (Bloom would remind her of that), or that the person she is reporting might be going through an ordeal (Foster Wallace would remind her of that). To her, I imagine, that makes no difference. Or perhaps not, and, poor thing, she is doing what she can. Be that as it may, I must assume that my neighbor has turned her home into a panopticon to watch and control, and, certainly, it is a shame, because we will continue to be neighbors, whether she likes it or not. Now you can draw the parallels with our current times, as if this story were just a metaphor.