The Empathy Exams Essays

This is the grand fiction of tourism, that bringing our bodies somewhere draws that place closer to us, or we to it. It’s a quick fix of empathy. We can take it like a shot of tequila, or a bump of coke from the key to a stranger’s home. We want the inebriation of presence to dissolve the fact of difference.

It's Othello’s Desdemona Problem: fearing the worst is worse than knowing the worst. So you eventually start wanting the worst possible thing to happen—finding your wife in bed with another man, or watching the worm finally come into the light. Until the worst happens, it always might happen. When it actually does happen? Now, at least, you know.

I wonder if my empathy has always been this, in every case: just a bout of hypothetical self-pity projected onto someone else. Is this ultimately just solipsism? Adam Smith confesses in his Theory of Moral Sentiments: "When we see a stroke aimed and just ready to fall upon the leg or arm of another person, we naturally shrink and draw back our own leg or our own arm."

We care about ourselves. Of course we do. Maybe some good comes from it. If I imagine myself fiercely into my brother's pain, I get some sense, perhaps, of what he might want or need, because I think, I would want this. I would need this. But it also seems like a fragile pretext, turning his misfortunes into an opportunity to indulge pet fears of my own devising.

not arguing that beauty was more important than profundity, just admitting that she might have chosen it - that beauty was more difficult to live without.

because I want them to be innocent, I need them to be saints

Drew and Cat so full of goodness, their nerves so awake to this world, explaining it so patiently, inhabiting with utter grace their small fraction of a torn territory.

Solomon paraphrases Tanner's argument that "sentimental people indulge their feelings instead of doing what should be done" and cites the example of Nazi commander Rudolf Hoess, who wept at an opera staged by concentration camp prisoners.

Your refrigerated bus crosses the concrete spine of the LA River, icon and encapsulation of the city's wasteland shame.

Your friend tells him you grew up here, in Santa Monica, and you feel ashamed because you know Santa Monica isn't here at all.

You like this kind of tour, where there is such a thing as a stupid question

In his theory of the sublime, eighteenth-century philosopher Edmund Burke proposes the notion of "negative pain": the idea that a feeling of fear - paired with a sense of safety, and the ability to look away - can produce a feeling of delight. One woman can sit on her couch with a glass of Chardonnay and watch another woman drink away her life.

She still calls him the love of her life. He says, "What's up?" and keeps cooking lunch.

The insistence upon an external agent of damage implies an imagining of the self as a unified entity, a collection of physical, mental, and spiritual components all serving the good of some Gestalt whole - the being itself. When really, the self - at least, as I've experienced mine - is much more discordant and self-sabotaging, neither fully integrated nor consistently serving its own good.

I found stray bits of hardened skin and weird threads - from bandages or who-knows-what? - and I read them like tea leaves to discern what made me feel so trapped in my own body.

We care in order to be cared for. We care because we are porous.

It offered assurance rather than empathy, or maybe assurance was evidence of empathy, insofar as he understood that assurance, not identification, was what I needed most.

Empathy is a kind of care but it's not the only kind of care, and it's not always enough. I want to think that's what Dr. G was thinking. I needed to look at him and see the opposite of my fear, not its echo.

I had an insecurity that didn't know how to express itself; that could attach itself to tears or to their absence. Alexander was a pretty bad horse today. When of course the horse wasn't the problem. Dr. M became a villain because my story didn't have one. It was the kind of pain that comes without a perpetrator.

I would tell her that commonality doesn't inoculate against hurt.

Which is to say: that kitchen held the ghosts of countless days that felt easier than the one we were living now.

I felt the weight of expectation on every moment - the sense that the end of this pregnancy was something I should feel sad about, the lurking fear that I never felt sad about what I was supposed to feel sad about, the knowledge that I'd gone through several funerals dry eyed, the hunch that I had a parched interior life activated only by the need for constant affirmation, nothing more.

The author described a pulsing fist of fear and loneliness inside her - a fist she'd carried her whole life, had numbed with drinking and sex - and explained how her pregnancy had replaced this fist with the tiny bud of her fetus, a moving life

This was the double blade of how I felt about anything that hurt: I wanted someone else to feel it with me, and I also wanted it entirely for myself

It's not enough for someone to have a sympathetic manner or use a caring tone. The students have to say the right words to get credit for compassion.