sweet auburn | 2024 volume i greater WELCOME
Colonial burial grounds often reinforced mortality with symbols like these memento mori skulls seen at Rumney Marsh Burial Ground in Revere , MA ( left ) and Burial Hill in Plymouth , MA ( right ).
In every respect , this is not what Mount Auburn is and aspires to be . To move through our landscape is to join a fellowship not of fear but of empathy , evoked by monuments of tender affection and aesthetic beauty . When we see the small grave markers labeled simply “ Freddie ” or “ Our precious baby ”; when we see someone ’ s grave laid with fresh flowers every day and surrounded by carefully tended shrubs and trees ; when we see the sweet , sometimes time-worn sculptures of lambs or angels in the Cemetery landscape , we feel part of a community . In other words , we feel empathy toward those whose loved ones are commemorated in our beautiful Mount Auburn . In caring about others and feeling their losses , we feel cared for ourselves .
Empathy is relatively new concept . The word was coined in English only in 1908 as a translation of the German word Einfühlung , meaning “ in-feeling .” In the beginning , the word was mostly applied in the realms of art-criticism and aesthetics as a means of understanding what a person felt ( physically ) when confronted with an art object or a thing of beauty . The brilliant nineteenth-century writer Vernon Lee ( born Violet Paget ) worked with her partner Kit Anstruther- Thomson to document how the latter ’ s eyes , breathing , balance , and sense of space changed as she beheld an art object : a pot , a chair , a painting . Lee then spent years writing down her own sensory responses to particular art objects , mostly in great Italian collections such as Florence ’ s Uffizi Gallery , including music that ran through her head , and her
breathing and heart rate , as a way of gauging Einfühlung . Within a generation , however , the notion of empathy had migrated from aesthetics into psychology , where it was understood to mean a person ’ s capacity to comprehend and share the feelings of another person . ( Empathy is not the same as sympathy , which implies a feeling of pity for someone rather than an understanding of that person ’ s emotions .)
There is now a whole literature that debates the parameters of empathy : its diminishment in our technological society ( Jamil Zaki ); prescriptions for its use in personal well-being ( Helen Reiss ); its relation to “ mirroring ” or motor mimicry in neurology ( Giacomo Rizzolato ); and so on . Susan Lanzoni , in her thoughtful book Empathy : A History ( 2018 ), writes : “ Among [ empathy ’ s ] many definitions are : emotional resonance or contagion , motor mimicry , a complex cognitive and imaginative capacity , perspective taking , kinesthetic modeling , a firing of mirror neurons , concern for others , and sometimes , although rarely , aesthetic self-projection , its earliest meaning .” Those supposedly skilled in building relationships with other human beings may now be called “ empaths ”; schools of landscape design and education have been generated with the aim of utilizing or generating empathy .
Though “ empathy ” has come to mean a wide variety of things , it is still a useful and powerful concept . As Lanzoni writes , “ History tells us that empathy comprises a complex , artful but also effortful practice that enrolls feeling , intellect , and imagination . Empathy dares us to move beyond the
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