Sympathies

Never are we more concerned with getting it right than when writing to one who has suffered a loss. In My Deepest Sympathies--, letter-writing guru Florence Isaacs guides us through the ins and outs of offering comfort and support with short yet meaningful notes that will long be remembered by their recipients. She offers guidelines for diverse situations, with sample letters to draw on, so that it's easy to strike the appropriate tone every time. Isaacs explains that the individual circumstances help determine what's appropriate to say in a sympathy note, and she provides specific techniques for a wide range of relationships, from the death of a coworker's spouse to the loss of a friend's elderly parent from Alzheimer's. She also addresses complex situations like the death of an ex-wife, an estranged sibling, or a longtime companion. She even includes thoughtful words for the death of a pet. Whether it's for a blank note or a few extra lines on a card, Isaacs's advice runs the gamut from personal to professional. And she explains how to provide real help to the bereaved by making phone calls, running errands, or simply lending an ear. Information on funerals, memorial services, and proper etiquette when someone of a different culture has died will help readers avoid missteps in potentially awkward situations. Isaacs closes with techniques for effective eulogies, plus a special appendix of actual eulogies that illustrate ways in which readers can memorialize a loved one for family and friends. Filled with practical information, My Deepest Sympathies-- makes it simple to say and do the right thing at difficult times.

Adam Smith, in his The Theory of Moral Sentiments, largely left his readers to develop his argument's full implications. Many philosophers famously did so, including Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine, and John Millar, among others, but less known are Sophie de Grouchy's own contributions, presented here alone in translation. Grouchy (1764-1822) published her Letters on Sympathy in 1798 together with her French translation of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. While Grouchy's Letters mainly engage critically with Smith's philosophical analysis of sympathy, they offer valuable perspectives and original thoughts about the relationship of emotional and moral development to legal, economic, and political reform. In particular, Grouchy sought to understand how the mechanisms of sympathy could help the development of new social and political institutions after the revolution. Her Letters further contain profound reflections on the dangers of demagoguery, the nature of tragedy, and the roles of love and friendship. Though ostensibly a commentary on Smith, the Letters stand in their own right as significant and original contributions to political philosophy. This new translation by Sandrine Bergès of a text by a forgotten female philosopher illuminates new inroads to Enlightenment and feminist thought and reveals insights that were far ahead of their time. The volume includes a critical introduction, explanatory notes, and a glossary of terms to provide critical and historical analysis for the novice reader.

This groundbreaking drama explores a sensitive young man's coming of age amid the taunts and suspicions of his classmates and teachers at a private boy's academy. Only a sympathetic act of compassion by the wife of the headmaster gives young Tom the courage to grow into a man.

Chinese Sympathies examines how Europeans—German-speaking writers and thinkers in particular—identified with Chinese intellectual and literary traditions following the circulation of Marco Polo's Travels. This sense of affinity expanded and deepened, Daniel Leonhard Purdy shows, as generations of Jesuit missionaries, baroque encyclopedists, Enlightenment moralists, and translators established intellectual regimes that framed China as being fundamentally similar to Europe. Analyzing key German literary texts—theological treatises, imperial histories, tragic dramas, moral philosophies, literary translations, and poetic cycles—Chinese Sympathies traces the paths from baroque-era missionary reports that accommodated Christianity with Confucianism to Goethe's concept of world literature, bridged by Enlightenment debates over cosmopolitanism and sympathy, culminating in a secular principle that allowed readers to identify meaningful similarities across culturally diverse literatures based on shared human experiences. This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of the Pennsylvania State University. Learn more at the TOME website, available at: openmonographs.org. The open access edition is available at Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

'If there is one thing we can learn from John Ruskin, it is that each age must find its own way to beauty' writes Lars Spuybroek in The Sympathy of Things, his ground-breaking work which proposes a radical new aesthetics for the digital era. Spuybroek argues that we must 'undo' the twentieth century and learn to understand the aesthetic insights of the nineteenth-century art critic John Ruskin, from which he distils pointers for the contemporary age. Linking philosophy, design, and the digital, with art history, architecture, and craft, Spuybroek explores the romantic notion of 'sympathy', a core concept in Ruskin's aesthetics, re-evaluating it as the driving force of the twenty-first century aesthetic experience. For Ruskin, beauty always comprises variation, imperfection and fragility, three concepts that wholly disappeared from our mindsets during the twentieth century, but which Spuybroek argues to be central to contemporary aesthetics and design. Revised throughout, and a new foreword by philosopher Brian Massumi, this is a new edition of a seminal work which has drawn praise from fields as diverse as digital architecture and speculative realism, and will continue to be influential as it wrests Ruskin's ideas out of the Victorian era and reconstructs them for the modern age.

Love and Sympathy in Theravada Buddhism discusses the context and contents of the Theravada teachings on love, sympathy, and the collective meditative set of four sublime attitudes (brahmavihara) universal love, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. The presentation is based upon the first four of the five collections of Buddha's discourses, a stylistically homogeneous compilation of the earliest strata of Theravada scripture compiled before 350 B.C. After discussing the Pali material relevant to these topics in the first five chapters of this work, the author includes a detailed examination and critique of their position in Chapter Six. His concern is with the motives to social action as well as the psychological and soteriological import of the Theravada teachings on love, sympathy, and the sublime attitudes. Only through seeing these facets can the unique vision of Theravada Buddhism be appreciated.

This ground-breaking study of sympathetic readings in Victorian fiction breathes new life into contemporary literary criticism.

This polyphonic novel of an S.S. officer, his ailing wife, and a concentration camp survivor “marks a vital turn in Holocaust literature” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Being appointed administrator of the Buchenwald work camp is a major advancement for SS Sturmbannführer Dietrich Hahn. But as the prison population begins to rise, his job becomes ever more consuming. His wife, Frau Greta Hahn, finds their new home even lovelier than their apartment in Munich. She enjoys life among the other officer’s wives, and the ease with which she can purchase nearly anything her heart desires. When Frau Hahn is forced into an unlikely alliance with one of Buchenwald’s prisoners, Dr. Lenard Weber, her naïve ignorance about what is going on so nearby is challenged. A decade earlier, Dr. Weber had invented a machine: the Sympathetic Vitaliser. At the time he believed that its subtle resonances might cure cancer. But does it really work? One way or another, it might yet save a life. A tour de force about the evils of obliviousness, Remote Sympathy compels us to question our continuing and willful ability to look the other way in a world that is once more in thrall to the idea that everything—even facts, truth and morals—is relative. Shortlisted for the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards