The Living and the Dead

When New Haven’s New Burying Ground was set up in the 1790s, it marked a revolution in cemetery planning. It was outside of town, neatly organized into family plots and class clusters. Yale President Timothy Dwight thought it unique in the world, and gave a rationale for its design:

“It is always desirable that a burial ground should be a solemn object to man, because in this manner it easily becomes a source of useful instruction and desirable impressions. But, when placed in the centre of a town and in the current of daily intercourse, it is rendered too familiar to the eye to have any beneficial effect on the heart. From its proper, venerable character, it is degraded into a mere common object, and speedily loses all its connection with the invisible world in a gross and vulgar union with the ordinary business of life.”

Dwight doesn’t think the dead too gross and vulgar for the living, but the opposite: Life shouldn’t be allowed to disturb the sacred dead and those who contemplate them.

(Quotation from Marilyn Yalom, The American Resting Place, 43.)