Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [689]

If hyperempathy syndrome were a more common complaint, people couldn’t do such things. They could kill if they had to, and bear the pain of it or be destroyed by it. But if everyone could feel everyone else’s pain, who would torture? Who would cause anyone unnecessary pain? I’ve never thought of my problem as something that might do some good before, but the way things are, I think it would help. I wish I could give it to people. — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 689

Note

The chapter’s one genuine turn: the narrator’s affliction — until now rendered purely as a burden, a vulnerability that makes her share the pain of every wound she witnesses — is reread in a single rhetorical step as a remedy for the world’s cruelty. The two questions (“who would torture? Who would cause anyone unnecessary pain?”) do the argumentative work by assuming the answer, and “I wish I could give it to people” lands as a wish for contagion, converting a private defect into a proposed solution.