Beware of Pity

3 ideas

1. Lieutenant Hofmiller and the crippled Edith

   In 1914 Lieutenant Anton Hofmiller, a young Austro-Hungarian cavalry officer, asks the paralysed Edith von Kekesfalva to dance, not knowing she cannot walk. Out of guilt he keeps visiting her family, lets his kindness be taken for love, and is pressed into a secret engagement that he then denies to his fellow officers. When she learns of the denial, Edith throws herself from the terrace, and Hofmiller spends the following weeks waiting for the war that finally breaks out about a month later.

2. Two kinds of pity: sentimental versus creative

   The doctor Condor separates weak, sentimental pity, which is really the impatient wish to free oneself quickly from the discomfort of another's suffering, from real compassion. Real compassion is unsentimental and creative, knows what it wants, and is ready to endure with the sufferer to the limit of its strength. The first kind is the more dangerous because it offers relief it cannot keep giving.

3. Self-image as the hidden engine of compassion

   Read charitable acts by what they do for the giver's picture of himself. Hofmiller keeps returning to the Kekesfalvas partly because being the adored benefactor makes him feel important and good. The same vanity makes him deny the engagement when his comrades' mockery threatens that picture, so the motive behind the kindness is also the motive behind the betrayal.

Save and mark ideas in the app