No, it is not a matter of bows and fine speeches. We’ve had enough of that.
It is (how best to phrase it?) a natural ease, a politeness of the heart, the kind of step backward the God of the cabalists once took, so that the universe of the other can exist. And I, who am a slow student of the art, find it where I can, in Montaigne and Spinoza, the smile of a Benedictine nun through a latticed parlor, an old Hasid in Jerusalem giving a coin to a beggar and saying “Thank you” for the opportunity of fulfilling a commandment. I have seen it among the poor, who, like the serpent in Eden, learn humility by staying on the ground. And among the great, those noblemen and ladies in Shakespeare moving with such grace through their disasters: the duke in the forest of Arden, Hermione answering the maddened king, Brutus before the last battle, taking the lute from under the arm of his sleeping boy-servant, gently.