Compassion

Prospect Park is one of New York’s glories.  Unlike Central Park, it offers you the illusion of being in open countryside, where you forget you’re in the middle of a great  city.  The illusion is broken in some places, though.  When walking towards the Grand Army Plaza, for example, along a path parallel to the West Drive, Richard Meier’s One Prospect Park, a new condominium on the corner of Plaza Street and Eastern Parkway, rears its glass façade well above the trees, providing an unwelcome reminder that you’re in a city.  You avert your eyes from the building, but soon you come to the Endale Arch, a pedestrian underpass near the main entrance to the park.  There you can see a peculiarly urban phenomenon, a homeless man.

When it’s not raining, he sits on a rock at the entrance to the arch, reading a book.  In inclement weather, he lies inside the arch – a structure perhaps 30 feet long – on the ground along one wall.  Resting on several blankets, with a small bag containing his possessions, he’s a dark-complexioned African American of middle age, wearing a hooded parka.   

The other day when I passed him, I did not avert my eyes from him, as I did from One Prospect Park.  Unmoving, unblinking, he stared at me in return.  As I strode past him, I remembered another homeless man who occupied the nearby Meadowport Arch, whom I passed daily for several years.  Also an African American of middle age, the Meadowport homeless man appeared more put together – his clothes well pressed, his beard neatly trimmed - than does his Endale counterpart, who looks as if he has just  tumbled out of a spinning dryer. 

I wrote about the Meadowport man in July of last year, in a post called “Too Late.”  It was too late because after passing by that man for several years, he disappeared.  The bench he occupied inside the arch was empty of his neatly folded blankets and his pile of paperback books.  Where had he gone?  What had become of him?  And I regretted never having greeted him, never having said hello, although I admitted that had he continued living in the arch, I probably would never have done so.

I can no longer greet the Meadowport man, but I can do so with his counterpart in the Endale Arch.  But should I? Would it be at all appropriate?  Would he interpret it as condescension?  Would he even notice?  I believe he would, because unlike the Meadowport man, who seemed enclosed within a private glass cylinder, the Endale man seems alive to the world around him, at least as evidenced by his staring at me.  He must be lonely, but perhaps he wants to be let alone. 

This week our Mussar group is considering the trait of compassion.  That I feel sorry for the Endale man goes without saying, but compassion must be expressed if it is not to be empty.  What expression can I give to my compassion for him?  Giving him money seems out of the question.  He doesn’t ask for it and he might be insulted by the offer.  If his apparent isolation is painful to him, perhaps a greeting would be welcome.  On the other hand, perhaps he would interpret it as an offense to his dignity.  I will probably continue to do nothing at all, just as I did with the Meadowport man, and when and if I no longer see him, I will again regret my inaction.  But no man is an island, entire of itself.  When I pass the Endale man, I hear the bell tolling for me.  If only I knew how to respond.


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