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Small girl to parent, on finding a dove in the driveway: “Let me try: I speak bird a little.”
“Our imaginations put us in the Lion's skin, place the sparkling slippers on our feet, and send us cackling through the air on a broomstick.”
This essay puts forth gently, in nondoctrinaire fashion, two claims, the first being that what we call empathy ought more properly to be called sympathy; the second that empathy per se may be found in its purest form in childhood rather than in adulthood. Unlike mercy, at least in Portia's view, the quality of empathy does not drop as the gentle rain from heaven. It does not bless all souls ubiquitously and without discrimination. Empathy is not, that is to say, equivalent to the fellow feeling that occurs routinely in adults. Rather, it appears rarely and wondrously like a sudden downpour on a blistering summer's day.
Writing from his quarterly column in American Imago, Warren Poland (2007) laments the misuse and overuse of the term