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1、Unit TwoThe gift of Gift-givingAnthony BrandtI dated a woman for a while literary type, well-read, lots of books in her place whom I admired a bit to extravagantly, and one Christmas I decided to give her something unusually nice and, Im afraid, unusually expensive. I bought her a set of Swifts Work
2、s not just any set but a scarce early eighteenth-century edition; then I wrapped each leather-bound volume separately and made a card for each volume, each card containing a carefully chose quotation from Swift himself. I thought it was terribly romantic; I had visions of her opening the set, volume
3、 by volume, while we sat by the fire Christmas Eve sipping cognac and listening to the Brandenburg Concertos.How stupid I am sometimes! She, practical woman that I should have known she was, had bought me two pairs of socks and a shirt, plus a small volume of poems by A. R. Ammons. She cried when sh
4、e opened the Swift. I thought they were tears of joy, but they werent. “ I cant accept this,” she said. “ Its totally out of proportion.” She insisted that I take the books back or sell them or keep them for myself. When I protested she just got more upset, and finally she asked me to leave and to t
5、ake the books with me. Hurt and perplexed, I did. We stopped seeing each other soon after that. It took me weeks to figure out what I had done wrong. “Theres a goat in all of us,” R. P. Blackmur wrote somewhere, “ a stupid, stubborn goat.”To my credit, Im normally more perspicacious about the gifts
6、I give, and less of a show-off. but I have it in me, obviously, to be, as my ex-girlfriend said, totally out of proportion: to give people things I cant afford, or things that betoken an intimacy that doesnt exist, or things that bear no relation to the interests or desires of the person Im giving t
7、hem to. Ive kicked myself too often not to know its there, this insensitivity to the niceties of gift-giving.The niceties, of course, not the raw act of giving ( and certainly not the thought) are what count. In most cultures, most of them more sensible than our own, the giving of gifts is highly ri
8、tualistic- that is, it is governed by rules and regulations; it is under strict social control. It is also, more or less explicitly, an exchange. None of this giving with no thought of receiving; on the contrary, you give somebody something and you expect something back in return maybe not right awa
9、y but soon enough. And it is expected to be of more or less equivalent value; you can be fairly certain that nobody is going to one-up you with something really extravagant like a scarce set of Swift, or else turn greedy on you and give you a penny whistle in return for a canoe. And once thats under
10、 control, the giving and receiving of gifts is free to become ceremonious, an occasion for feasting and celebration. You can finish your cognacs, in other words , and get down to the real business of the evening.Gift-giving involves the expectation of reciprocity therefore, but we wise men of the We
11、stern world avoid this fact: we paper it over with rhetoric about selflessness, about how much better it is to give than to receive. “ An honorable benefactor never thinks on the good turn he does,” wrote Seneca nearly two thousand years ago. Indeed. The honorable, the noble thing to do, we like to
12、tell ourselves, is to give it and forget it, to expect nothing at all in return, not even gratitude. To give freely, spontaneously, like nature in her abundance. Like some happy hooker who neglects to charge her customers. Like Gods own fool.Ive given some thought to my own proclivities in this matt
13、er and have concluded that even at my most ridiculously generous, my most spontaneously giving, I expect something in return as much as the next man does. Im trying literally to buy something: affection, maybe love. Someones admiration. Or to establish my chosen identity as a romantic, capable of ma
14、king the grand gesture. Or to inspire guilt: See, Ive thought hard and gone to a lot of trouble to get you what you might want, to penetrate to your heart and give it its desire. Have you done the same for me? My girlfriend saw through all this right away. As I said, it took me weeks.The niceties. W
15、hat are the niceties? I used to think there were no niceties, that the thought really was all that counted. I might have gotten this from my mother, who every Christmas spent exactly the same amount of money on my brother and me no favorite sons in this household and made sure we knew it. My mother
16、seldom wrapped gifts, or if she did, she used the cheapest possible tissue paper and no ribbons. We had no-frills birthdays, a no-frills Christmas. I forgot her birthday once, even after she had dropped numerous hints that it was imminent, and she made me feel quite ashamed about it. The overall lesson was that you remembered you might give foolish things, but you remembered and you gave generously; there was always an abundance of
