Giving

So one way of thinking about it – about all of it, I mean; the whole ball of wax – is that men and women work, and always have worked, with profit in the front of their minds. The efficiency of a Roman aqueduct in rural Latium; the first movement of a symphony by Beethoven; the heartful poems of Milosz: all of it done, on some level, in order to put bread on the table.

But of course there are other ways of thinking, as well. And one that appeals to me is the idea that such accomplishments can be framed, at some point, as gifts. As gifts to their users, or their readers, in the present tense – but also as gifts to future generations, or to what we often call posterity. Dante struggles, in the Ravennate court, to find a rhyme; you and I benefit from his work. And we may never know the name of the carver of the Stele of Hammurabi, but we may nonetheless thank him, in a nebulous way, for his generosity.

And then I wonder: where, in this simple scheme of alternatives, does parenting stand? Yes, sure, on the one hand we do it out of a sense of obligation, and expectation: there is a real pressure, I’d hold, that one feels on a playground peopled with other parents. And the social Darwinists would presumably claim that parents are motivated, similarly, by a set of motives honed by the cold force of natural selection.

Ultimately, though, the idea of a gift once again appeals, more fully than the alternatives. The tiny sock carried, and then gently put on the screaming baby; the soft, repeated explanations (“that’s a helicopter”) and pieces of advice. We received them all once, from our parents; now, as parents, we finally have a chance to give, in turn.