The Art of Giving and Receiving — Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson picks up the Gifts essay where Manners left off: flowers and fruits please because they seem to court us, and summer fruit after a hundred-mile journey feels proportionate. Necessity makes pertinences every day. If the man at the door has no shoes, you do not debate a paint-box. Supplying bread and water satisfies because the need is clear. Let the petitioner judge his necessity; if the desire is fantastic, leave punishment to the Furies. Emerson would rather play almost any part than theirs.

The real rule comes from a friend: give what belongs to the person's character and attaches to them in thought. Rings and jewels are not gifts but apologies for gifts. The only gift is a portion of thyself. Thou must bleed for me. The poet brings a poem, the shepherd a lamb, the girl a handkerchief of her own sewing. That restores society to its basis, when a man's biography travels in his gift. Buying something at a goldsmith's that does not represent your life is cold, fit for kings and false property.

Then the awkward part. The law of benefits is a difficult channel. It is not the office of a man to receive gifts. How dare you give them? We wish to be self-sustained. We do not quite forgive a forgiver. The hand that feeds us may be bitten. He is a good man who can receive a gift well, yet both gladness and grief at a gift are unbecoming. The gift must be the giver flowing to you as you flow to him. Expectation of gratitude is mean and punished by the insensibility of the obliged. Emerson sympathizes with Timon's beneficiaries more than with Timon's anger. There is no commensurability between a man and any gift; you cannot give anything to a magnanimous person, who puts you in debt by his magnanimity.

Love is the genius and god of gifts, yet Emerson will not prescribe to it. For the rest, only likeness avails. Services prove an intellectual trick; they eat your apples and leave you out. Love them and they delight in you. The file turns to Nature with its opening poem and those days when the world reaches perfection, air and earth in harmony, cattle with great tranquil thoughts. In pure October weather called Indian Summer, the day sleeps over broad hills, and to have lived through all its sunny hours seems longevity enough.