Godbout ( The World of the Gift , 40-41 ) remarks on the fact that “in modern society, children are the only people to whom one can give without even being tempted to do an accounting.” Many (he says) give to children and don’t expect them to make any return for the first twenty . . . . Continue Reading »
In his work on Geschenk Nach Form Und Inhalt , written i 1914, Wilhelm Gaul laid out many of the parameters for future discussion of the gift. Harry Liebersohn ( The Return of the Gift ) quotes this impressive passage: “What is striking at once about the ‘modern’ gift is the much . . . . Continue Reading »
In his Guilt and Gratitude: A Study of the Origins of Contemporary Conscience (Contributions in Philosophy) (pp. 37-8) , Joseph Amato follows Karl Polanyi in noting how the introduction of markets, contract, cash, corporations “radically transformed traditional man’s fundamental . . . . Continue Reading »
In the second book of De Specialibus Legibus Philo writes about the feast of trumpets: “Immediately after comes the festival of the sacred moon; in which it is the custom to play the trumpet in the temple at the same moment that the sacrifices are offered. From which practice this is called . . . . Continue Reading »
Archaeology seems to be on the margins of cultural history, the province of antiquarians. In her fascinating Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism , though, Cathy Gere traces the impact of Arthur Evans’ excavation and reconstruction of Minoan civilization on modernists from Nietzsche to . . . . Continue Reading »
Plato worried that writing would spoil memory. He should not have. Jack Goody has found that verbatim memorization only appears in literate societies. As summarized by Ian Morris in 1 1986 Classical Antiquity article, Goody concluded that “It is only when mnemonic devices drawn from writing . . . . Continue Reading »
For the ancients, the week was a tuned cosmos. According to ancient astronomy, the planets were in crystal spheres that formed a seven-stringed lyre in the sky. Moving from earth outward, the seven strings are: moon, Mercury, Venus, sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. If you ascended from earth all the way . . . . Continue Reading »
Bonnie MacLachlan ends her fascinating The Age of Grace (p. 147) by suggesting that the starting point for the Greek idea of charis is that it is a “social pleasure.” In some of the poetry she examines, though, “the accent was placed on the element of reciprocity, on the . . . . Continue Reading »
Reflecting on the precipitous decline in Lincoln’s reputation in the last third of the twentieth century, Barry Schwartz ( Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era: History and Memory in Late Twentieth-Century America , pp. 258-9) notes in passing: “Before the 1960s, textbook writers . . . . Continue Reading »
In a treatment of envy and gratitude, Visser ( The Gift of Thanks: The Roots and Rituals of Gratitude , p. 362-3) notes that the Latin invidia comes from videre and means “‘seeing with intensity,’ paying meticulous and malevolent attention, eyeing in order to measure and compare . . . . Continue Reading »
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