The Gift

by Lewis Hyde

CHAPTER THREE

  The Labor

  of Gratitude

  My vocation [his sense, as a child, that he would be a writer]

  changed everything: the sword-strokes fly off, the writing

  remains; I discovered in belles-lettres that the Giver can be

  transformed into his own Gift, that is, into a pure object. Chance

  had made me a man, generosity would make me a book.

  JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

  The old engraving reproduced here shows gifts being given out at a funeral, a custom common in Wales a century or more ago. The coffin was placed on a bier outside the house near the door. One of the deceased’s relatives would then distribute bread and cheese to the poor, taking care to hand the gifts over the coffin. Sometimes the bread or cheese had a piece of money inside it. In expectation of the gift, the poor would have earlier gathered flowers and herbs to grace the coffin.

  Funeral gifts belong to a general class I call “threshold gifts,” gifts that mark the passage from one place or state into another. The gifts passed over the coffin in this instance reflect a particular image of what it is to die. Bodily death is not a final death, they say, but a change, a passage that benefits from the protection of gift exchange. The Welsh believed that the dead who were not properly laid to rest would be left to walk ceaselessly on earth. They would become the restless dead, never bound up in the spirit of their race. Similar myths are found all over the world. The Haida believed the dead live in spirit villages to which they must travel after death, and a corpse was buried with gifts intended to help the soul on its journey. The image is kin as well to the Roman Catholic belief that a soul’s stay in purgatory can be relieved through the charity of the living and the sacrifice of the mass. In each case, death begins a passage that ends with the soul’s incorporation into the spiritual world, or the spiritual body of the tribe (“the bosom of Abraham” for the Jews).

  Threshold gifts belong to a wider group we might call “gifts of passage.” I have adapted these terms from Arnold Van Gennep’s classic work, The Rites of Passage. Van Gennep divides rites of passage into three groups: rites of separation, rites of transition, and rites of incorporation. He also calls these “preliminal,” “liminal,” and “postliminal rites”—that is, before the doorway, on the threshold, and in the house. Rites of separation are not so commonly marked by gifts, but even a quick survey of Van Gennep’s work will show that rites in his other two categories are.* Threshold gifts may be the most common form of gift we have, so well known as to need little elaboration here. They attend times of passage or moments of great change. They are with us at every station of life, from the shower for the coming baby to the birthday parties of youth, from graduation gifts (and the social puberty rites of earlier times) to marriage gifts, from the food offered newcomers and the sick to the flowers placed upon the coffin. Once in my reading I came across an obscure society that even gave gifts to celebrate the arrival of a child’s second teeth—only to realize later that of course the writer meant the tooth fairy!

  Threshold gifts mark the time of, or act as the actual agents of, individual transformation. In a recent book on the Trobriand Islands, Annette Weiner presents an interesting idea about these gifts that mark the various stages of the life cycle. Weiner tells us that in the Trobriands at least, “at each important phase in the cycle (i.e., conception, birth, marriage, death, and rebirth), a transformation of a person occurs as artifacts are detached from others and invested in ego.” She means that there are two sides to each exchange and to each transformation: on the one hand, the person approaching a new station in life is invested with gifts that carry the new identity; on the other hand, some older person—the donor who is leaving that stage of life—disinvests himself of an old identity by bestowing these same gifts upon the young. Weiner’s main contribution to the ethnography of the Trobriand Islands has been to describe a sexual division of labor within this series of transformations. Men’s gifts organize the social and political identities of middle life, while women’s gifts are more concerned with birth, death, and rebirth. Women especially are in charge of collecting and disbursing the gifts given away at a mortuary ceremony during the course of which it is understood that the deceased is released not from any particular station in life but from his or her entire social being. “Symbolically,” Weiner writes, “women untie the dead person from all reciprocal claims, thus securing a [soul] that is pure ancestral essence.”

  Giving food over the coffin.

  I have taken death gifts as my example of threshold gifts not as an exceptional case but as the type, for I would like to speak of all transformations as involving death.* Spiritually, at least, the old life must leave before the new may enter. Initiation ceremonies make a good illustration because they commonly include a symbolic death. A man who was to be initiated into the priesthood among the Sabians (a Gnostic sect) would confine himself to a reed hut for a full week. During this time he was not allowed to sleep. Each day he would change his clothes and give alms to the poor. After seven days a funeral would be held for him, as he would then be considered dead. After the funeral he would be taken to a river and baptized. For the next two months he would bathe three times a day, eat only certain foods and give alms.

  The novitiate’s gifts are intended to encourage the death of the secular self and the birth of the spiritual. The alms are the evidence that the would-be priest is giving up the old life. All old gifts are handed over the coffin. It might be said that the gifts we give at times of transformation are meant to make visible the giving up we do invisibly. And of course we hope that there will be an exchange, that something will come toward us if we abandon our old lives. So we might also say that the tokens we receive at times of change are meant to make visible life’s reciprocation. They are not mere compensation for what is lost, but the promise of what lies ahead. They guide us toward new life, assuring our passage away from what is dying.

  The guidance is of use because there are those who do not survive change. It is as if human beings were like that subclass of insect, the Metabola, which must undergo complete metamorphosis from egg, through larva and pupa, to imago. In some way the fluidity of gift exchange assures the successful metamorphosis. Woody Allen used to tell a joke at the end of his stand-up routine: he would take a watch from his pocket, check the time, and then say, “It’s an old family heirloom. [Pause] My grandfather sold it to me on his deathbed.” The joke works because market exchange will always seem inappropriate on the threshold. There is a discrete range of conditions that will assure the emergence of the imago. A man who would buy and sell at a moment of change is one who cannot or will not give up, and if the passage is inevitable, he will be torn apart. He will become one of the done-for dead who truly die. Threshold gifts protect us from such death.

  There is a story in the Babylonian Talmud of a man whose astrologers told him that his daughter would not survive her marriage. She would, they prophesied, be bitten by a snake and die on her wedding day. As the story goes, on the night before her wedding the girl happened to hang her brooch up by sticking its pin into a hole in the wall where it pierced the eye of a serpent. When she took the brooch down in the morning, the snake came trailing after it. Her father asked if any act of hers could account for her having so luckily avoided her fate. “A poor man came to our door yesterday evening,” she replied. “Everybody was busy at the banquet, and there was none to attend to him. So I took the portion that was given to me and gave it to him.” “You have done a good deed,” her father said, and he went about thereafter lecturing that “charity delivereth from death.” And, the Talmud adds, “not merely from an unnatural death, but from death itself.”

  The astrologers had predicted that the daughter would not survive the passage from maiden to wife, but she does survive through an act of spontaneous generosity; she has the right spirit on the day of her wedding. The tale offers the same image as the Welsh funeral rite or the Sabian initiation: a moment of change is gua
rded by the giving of gifts. It’s not that there is no death, nor that there is no change—the novitiate and the bride suffer a “death,” but they are able to pass through it into new life under the aegis of the gift. We should really differentiate two sorts of death here: one that opens forward into a greater life and another—a dead-end death— that leaves a restless soul, unable to reach its home. This is the death we rightly fear. And just as gifts are linked to the death that moves toward new life, so, for those who believe in transformation (either in this life or in another), ideologies of market exchange have become associated with the death that goes nowhere. George Romero, the man who made the movie The Dawn of the Dead, set his film in a shopping mall near Pittsburgh; the parking lots and aisles of discount stores may be where the restless dead of a commodity civilization will tread out their numberless days.

  These stories present gift exchange as a companion to transformation, a sort of guardian or marker or catalyst. It is also the case that a gift may be the actual agent of change, the bearer of new life. In the simplest examples, gifts carry an identity with them, and to accept the gift amounts to incorporating the new identity. It is as if such a gift passes through the body and leaves us altered. The gift is not merely the witness or guardian to new life, but the creator. I want to speak of “teachings” as my primary example here. I do not mean schoolbook lessons, I mean those infrequent lessons in living that alter, or even save, our lives. I once worked for several years as a counselor to alcoholics in the detoxification ward of a city hospital. During those years I naturally became acquainted with Alcoholics Anonymous. AA provides a “program of recovery” for alcoholics that makes a good example of the sort of teaching gift I have in mind.

  AA is an unusual organization in terms of the way money is handled. Nothing is bought or sold. Local groups are autonomous and meet their minimal expenses—coffee, literature—through members’ contributions. The program itself is free. AA probably wouldn’t be as effective, in fact, if the program was delivered through the machinery of the market, not because its lessons would have to change, but because the spirit behind them would be different (the voluntary aspect of getting sober would be obscured, there would be more opportunity for manipulation, and—as I shall argue presently—the charging of fees for service tends to cut off the motivating force of gratitude, a source of AA’s energy).*

  So AA’s teachings are free, a literal gift. Someone who comes to the group will hear it said, “If you do such and such, you will stay sober for a day.” His pain is heavy or his desire strong, so he tries it. Suppose it works. Now he’s in an odd state. He has received the teaching and he’s seen that it has some power, but, as is always the case, it takes some time before the message really sinks in. An insight may come quickly, but the gut transformation is slow. After a day, even a month, of sobriety the newcomer isn’t a drunk, technically, but he’s not a recovered alcoholic, either. The teachings are “in passage” in the body of their recipient between the time they are received and the time when they have sunk in so deeply that they may be passed along. The process can take years.

  AA has “twelve steps to recovery,” which more or less summarize the program. The twelfth step is an act of gratitude: recovered alcoholics help other alcoholics when called upon to do so. It is a step in which the gift is passed along, so it is right that it should be the final one. In AA they speak of people who are “two-steppers”—that is, people who take Step One (accepting they are an alcoholic) and then jump directly to Step Twelve (helping others) without the in-between steps where the labor lies. They try to pass along something they themselves have not yet received.

  There are many other examples of teachings as transformative gifts. Spiritual conversions have the same structure as the AA experience: the Word is received, the soul suffers a change (or is released, or born again), and the convert feels moved to testify, to give the Word away again. Those whose lives have been touched by a true mentor will have known a similar history. I once met a man who ran a research lab for a large petrochemical firm. He had started to work for the company just out of high school, literally pushing a broom. An older man, a Ph.D., had then asked him to be the handyman in his research lab. The two of them worked together for years, the older man training the younger. When I met him in his late forties, the former handyman had earned a master’s degree in chemistry and was working in the same situation his mentor had filled when they first met. When I asked this man what he planned to do in the coming years, he said that he wanted to teach, “to pass it on to the younger men.”

  We could speak of artists’ lives and artists’ creations in a similar fashion. Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. The future artist finds himself or herself moved by a work of art, and, through that experience, comes to labor in the service of art until he can profess his own gifts. Those of us who do not become artists nonetheless attend to art in a similar spirit. We come to painting, to poetry, to the stage, hoping to revive the soul. And any artist whose work touches us earns our gratitude. The connection between art and gift is the subject of a later part of this book, but it deserves mention here, for it is when art acts as an agent of transformation that we may correctly speak of it as a gift. A lively culture will have transformative gifts as a general feature—it will have groups like AA which address specific problems, it will have methods of passing knowledge from old to young, it will have spiritual teachings available at all levels of maturation and for the birth of the spiritual self. And it will have artists whose creations are gifts for the transformation of the race.

  In each example I have offered of a transformative gift, if the teaching begins to “take,” the recipient feels gratitude. I would like to speak of gratitude as a labor undertaken by the soul to effect the transformation after a gift has been received. Between the time a gift comes to us and the time we pass it along, we suffer gratitude. Moreover, with gifts that are agents of change, it is only when the gift has worked in us, only when we have come up to its level, as it were, that we can give it away again. Passing the gift along is the act of gratitude that finishes the labor. The transformation is not accomplished until we have the power to give the gift on our own terms. Therefore, the end of the labor of gratitude is similarity with the gift or with its donor. Once this similarity has been achieved we may feel a lingering and generalized gratitude, but we won’t feel it with the urgency of true indebtedness.

  There is a group of folk tales that are models of the labor of gratitude. In each of them a spirit comes to help a mortal and stays, sometimes in actual bondage, until released by the mortal’s expression of gratitude.

  In a tale with which we are all familiar, “The Shoemaker and the Elves,” a shoemaker is down on his luck and has only enough leather to sew a single pair of shoes. He cuts the leather out and goes to bed, planning to sew the shoes in the morning. During the night, two naked elves come and make the shoes. The shoemaker is speechless with astonishment when he finds them. Not a stitch is out of place! The shoes are such a masterpiece that the first customer to appear in the morning pays handsomely for them, and the cobbler has enough money to buy leather for two pairs of shoes. That night he cuts the leather out and goes to bed. Again in the morning the shoes are made, and again they sell for such a price as to afford the leather for four pairs of shoes. In this way the shoemaker soon prospers.

  One evening (“not long before Christmas,” the tale says), the cobbler suggests to his wife that they stay up and see who has been helping them. They leave a candle burning, hide behind some coats, and, at midnight, see the elves come in and set to work. In the morning the wife says to the shoemaker, “The little men have made us rich and we should show our gratitude for this. They’re running about with nothing on and might freeze! I’m going to make them each a shirt, coat, jacket, trousers, and a pair of stockings. Why don’t you make them each a pair o
f little shoes.” The cobbler willingly agrees, and one night when the clothes are finished he lays them out on the bench in place of the leather. He and his wife hide behind the coats to watch.

  The elves are surprised and pleased to find the clothes. They put them on and sing—

  “We’re sleek, we’re fine, we’re out the door,

  We shan’t be cobblers any more!”

  And they dance around the room and away. They never return, but everything continues to go well with the shoemaker and he prospers at whatever he takes in hand.

  The tale is a parable of a gifted person. It describes the time between the initial stirrings of a gift (when it is potentially ours) and the releasing of a gift (when it is actually ours). In this case the gift is the man’s talent, carried by the elves. The shoemaker is poor, to begin with. His own worth is not available to him for some reason that is never explained. But then, while he is asleep, it begins to come. The process is always a bit mysterious. You work at a task, you work and work and still it won’t come right. Then, when you’re not even thinking about it, while spading the garden or stepping into the bus, the whole thing pops into your head, the missing grace is bestowed. That’s the elves, the “magic touch” by which our tasks take on life. The process does not end there, however, for the elves have need of us, as well. It is a curious detail in the story that these manikins so skilled with the needle and thread are unable to make themselves some clothes, but that seems to be the case. Their outfits and, above all, their freedom depend on the shoemaker’s recognition and gratitude.*

  My general point here is that a transformative gift cannot be fully received when it is first offered because the person does not yet have the power either to accept the gift or to pass it along. But I should qualify this. Some part of the self is able to apprehend the gift. We can feel the proffered future. I am reminded of the odd phenomenon of the “instant cure” in psychotherapy: sometimes in a very early session a patient will experience a total lifting of his or her neurosis. For a brief period, say a week, he will experience a longed-for freedom. Then normalcy will descend, and then the years of labor to acquire that freedom as a true possession. The gift is not ours yet but the fullness of the gift is felt, and we respond with gratitude and with desire. The shoemaker in this tale is completely asleep when the first gift arrives, so we can’t say he’s really acquired his talent. But he does feel something being roused in him and he gets to work.