19

Gratitude

The ending of remarks, at a testimonial dinner, on receipt of the “Julius Award” from the School of Public Administration, UCLA, March 21, 1990

I know that you expect from me a reflection or two on the matter of giving; indeed, on the matter of gratitude, which, really, is the theme of the evening. I am happy to take five more minutes of your time because I have long believed that we need to cultivate the faculty for gratitude.

When I was thirteen years old I was chaperoned here and there, along with two sisters of about the same age, about the greater environs of London. My music teacher, whom I loved and still do, was by my side when I went to the counter of a little souvenir shop in Stratford-upon-Avon and paid out three or four shillings for Shakespearean sundries I had picked out. An elderly lady behind the counter took my money, returned me some change, and then suddenly withdrew from the display case a tiny one-square-inch edition of Romeo and Juliet and, smiling, gave it to me. A gift. I took the sixpence she had just before given me in change, and deposited it in her hand: a reciprocal gift. Once outside, I received a resonant rebuke. My teacher told me I had done an offensive thing; she informed me that a gift is a gift. I must learn, she went on, to accept gifts. They are profaned by any attempt at automatic reciprocity. I cannot give you all tonight a Julius award.

Many years later I read in a biography of Abraham Lincoln about an episode that had briefly convulsed the receiving line at the White House. A lady in that line, after taking the president’s hand in formal greeting, thrust forward with her left hand a huge bundle of long-stemmed roses, depositing them, in effect, all over Mr. Lincoln. The president—and the receiving line—were immobilized. Abraham Lincoln smiled. And said after the briefest pause, “Are these really for me?”

“Yes,” his guest replied, beaming.

“In that case,” the president said, “I can think of nothing that would give me more pleasure than to present them to you.”

The flowers were returned; there were smiles all around, the lady took back her roses, and the line moved on. That is an unusual, perhaps a singular exception to my music teacher’s injunction against the social sin of reciprocal gifts. Few people in public life or private have managed such extemporaneous grace.

Many years went by. And then, just last summer, I received on my trusty electronic MCI a message from a friend, a computer expert. He said that the retrieval system I had been yearning for, one which would permit me to locate individual book titles in my library via my computer, had been completed: he had worked on it in the interstices of his busy schedule for over a month. “It is yours,” his message read on the screen, “as a belated Christmas present.” I flashed back on my own computer screen that I insisted he send me a bill for professional services. One minute later, my mind traveled back and I was again a little boy at a souvenir store at Stratford, embarrassing a kindly woman who had attempted an act of generosity. There and then I shed the grown-up equivalent of tears at my awkwardness.

But, as I reflect on it, there is a distinction. The gift automatically repaid in roughly equivalent tender is corrupted. It ceases to be a gift, and the philanthropic impulse is traduced. The unrequited gift, in Burke’s phrase, is one of the unbought graces of life: any effort to repay vulgarizes the offering, and one risks repaying a kindness with an act of aggression. We do not expect from those who will benefit from the scholarships you make available tonight a return to you of their scholarship gifts.

But a country—a civilization—that gives us gifts we dispose of cannot be repaid in kind. There is no way in which we can give to the United States a present of a bill of rights in exchange for its having given us a Bill of Rights.

Our offense—the near universal offense, remarked by Ortega y Gasset as the fingerprint of the masses in revolt—is that of the Westerner—rich or poor, learned or ignorant—who accepts without any thought of any debt incurred the patrimony we all enjoy, those of us who live in the free world. The numbing, benumbing thought that we owe nothing to Plato and Aristotle, nothing to the prophets who wrote the Bible, nothing to the generations who fought for freedoms activated in the Bill of Rights; we are basket cases of ingratitude, so many of us. We cannot hope to repay in kind what Socrates gave us, but to live lives without any sense of obligation—to those who made possible lives as tolerable as ours, within the frame of the human predicament God imposed on us, to our parents who suffered to raise us, to our teachers who labored to teach us, to the scientists who prolonged the lives of our children when disease struck them down—is spiritually atrophying.

We cannot repay the gift of the Beatitudes, with their eternal, searing meaning—Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. But our ongoing failure to recognize that we owe a huge debt that can be requited only by gratitude, defined here as appreciation however rendered of the best that we have, and a determined effort to protect and cherish it—any failure here marks us as the masses in revolt: against our benefactors, our civilization, against God himself.

To fail to experience gratitude when walking through the corridors of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, when listening to the music of Bach and Beethoven, when exercising our freedoms to speak, or, as will happen in California and elsewhere next November, to give, or to withhold, our assent, is more than to profane spontaneous generosity. It is to decline to express, however clumsily, to feel, however coarsely, our gratitude for the fruits of genius, for generosity, human and divine, for the great wellsprings of human talent and concern that gave us Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, our parents, our friends and, yes, the old lady in Stratford. We need a rebirth of gratitude for those who have cared for us, living and, mostly, dead; the high moments of our way of life are their gifts to us. We must remember them in our thoughts and in our prayers, and in our deeds. Remember them as you are doing tonight, in this act of gratitude to your School of Public Administration.