The Gift

by Lewis Hyde

  Once a gift has stirred within us it is up to us to develop it. There is a reciprocal labor in the maturation of a talent. The gift will continue to discharge its energy so long as we attend to it in return. The geometrical progression of exchange between shoemaker and elves reaches a sort of critical mass when the man finally decides to stay awake and watch the shop. Of course it’s amusing that it takes the shoemaker so long to get around to seeing who’s been helping out. We husband our gifts when we cannot do without them, or when they are not fully formed. But once his poverty has been relieved, the cobbler wonders where his riches have come from, and he and his wife stay up to see the elves; at this point we might say he wakes up to his gift.

  What can we make of the initial nudity of the elves, the clothes they are given, and the result of that gift? To put clothes on a thing is a kind of acknowledgment, like giving it a name. By this act we begin to differentiate what was undifferentiated. Sometimes we are unable to escape from a bad mood, for example, until we have correctly articulated the feeling. Articulation allows a slight gap to open between the feeling and the self, and that gap permits the freedom of both. In this story the clothes realize the gift (that is, they make it real, make it a thing). Note that the shoemaker makes his first pair of shoes (within the tale) in order to dress the elves. It’s the last act in his labor of gratitude. Now he’s a changed man. Now he has worth that can be communicated. The shoes he makes are a return gift which simultaneously accomplishes his own transformation and frees the elves. This is why I say that the end of the labor of gratitude is similarity with the gift or its donor. Now the man is a real shoemaker, as were the elves on the first night. (A gift isn’t fully realized until it is given away, then. Those who will not acknowledge gratitude or who refuse to labor in its service neither free their gifts nor really come to possess them.)

  In speaking of gratitude as a “labor” I mean to distinguish it from “work,” and I must digress briefly here to elaborate my distinction. Work is what we do by the hour. It begins and ends at a specific time and, if possible, we do it for money. Welding car bodies on an assembly line is work; washing dishes, computing taxes, walking the rounds in a psychiatric ward, picking asparagus—these are work. Labor, on the other hand, sets its own pace. We may get paid for it, but it’s harder to quantify. “Getting the program” in AA is a labor. It is likewise apt to speak of “mourning labor”: when a loved one dies, the soul undergoes a period of travail, a change that draws energy. Writing a poem, raising a child, developing a new calculus, resolving a neurosis, invention in all forms— these are labors.

  Work is an intended activity that is accomplished through the will. A labor can be intended but only to the extent of doing the groundwork, or of not doing things that would clearly prevent the labor. Beyond that, labor has its own schedule. Things get done, but we often have the odd sense that we didn’t do them. Paul Goodman wrote in a journal once, “I have recently written a few good poems. But I have no feeling that I wrote them.” That is the declaration of a laborer. Like the shoemaker, we wake up to discover the fruits of labor. And labor, because it sets its own pace, is usually accompanied by idleness, leisure, even sleep. In ancient days a seventh part of a person’s time (both Sunday and the sabbatical, the seventh year) were set aside for nonwork. Nowadays when a worker or teacher gets a sabbatical, he or she may try to finish six years of unfinished chores. But first he should put his feet up and see what happens. In numerology the “7” is the number for ripening; “8” is the number for perfection, but during the seventh period what has been accomplished by the will is left alone. It either ripens or it doesn’t. It’s out of our hands. One of the first problems the modern world faced with the rise of industrialism was the exclusion of labor by the expansion of work. Machines don’t need a Sunday. Early mill hands found themselves working a seven-day week, and had to fight for years to get back the Sabbath.*

  When I speak of a labor, then, I intend to refer to something dictated by the course of life rather than by society, something that is often urgent but that nevertheless has its own interior rhythm, something more bound up with feeling, more interior, than work. The labor of gratitude is the middle term in the passage of a gift. It is wholly different from the “obligation” we feel when we accept something we don’t really want. (An obligation may be discharged by an act of will.) A gift that has the power to change us awakens a part of the soul. But we cannot receive the gift until we can meet it as an equal. We therefore submit ourselves to the labor of becoming like the gift. Giving a return gift is the final act in the labor of gratitude, and it is also, therefore, the true acceptance of the original gift. The shoemaker finally gives away some shoes. The twelfth step in AA gives away what was received; the man who wanted to teach so as to “pass it on to the younger men” gives away what he received. In each case there is an interim period during which the person labors to become sufficiently empowered to hold and to give the gift.

  (It may be clearer now why I said above that a fee for service tends to cut off the force of gratitude. The point is that a conversion, in the general sense, cannot be settled upon ahead of time. We can’t predict the fruits of our labor; we can’t even know if we’ll really go through with it. Gratitude requires an unpaid debt, and we will be motivated to proceed only so long as the debt is felt. If we stop feeling indebted we quit, and rightly so. To sell a transformative gift therefore falsifies the relationship; it implies that the return gift has been made when in fact it can’t be made until the transformation is finished. A prepaid fee suspends the weight of the gift and depotentiates it as an agent of change. Therapies and spiritual systems delivered through the market will therefore tend to draw the energy required for conversion from an aversion to pain rather than from an attraction to a higher state. There’s no way to pay for a higher state unless you’re in it! The labor must precede. In the hospital where I worked we would ask people if they wanted to get sober, but that was only after someone had asked them if they could afford a week in the hospital. AA only asks if you want to get sober.)

  As a parable of a gifted person, “The Shoemaker and the Elves” is also a parable for artists. Most artists early on find themselves in the position of the shoemaker on the first night—a talent has appeared, but it’s naked, immature. Ahead lie the years of reciprocal labor which precede the release of an accomplished gift. To take a literary example, George Bernard Shaw underwent a typical period of retreat and maturation before he emerged as a writer. The young Shaw started a career in business and felt the threat not of failure but of success. “I made good in spite of myself, and found, to my dismay, that Business, instead of expelling me as the worthless imposter I was, was fastening upon me with no intention of letting go.” He was twenty. “In March, 1876, I broke loose,” he says. He left family, friends, business, and Ireland. He spent about eight years in absentia, writing constantly (five novels, published only toward the end of his life—and then with a note by Shaw asking the buyer not to read them). Erik Erikson has commented:

  Potentially creative men like Shaw build the personal fundament of their work during a self-decreed moratorium, during which they often starve themselves, socially, erotically, and, last but not least, nutritionally, in order to let the grosser weeds die out, and make way for the growth of their inner garden. Often, when the weeds are dead, so is the garden. At the decisive moment, however, some make contact with a nutriment specific for their gifts. For Shaw, of course, this gift was literature.

  For the slow labor of realizing a potential gift the artist must retreat to those Bohemias, halfway between the slums and the library, where life is not counted by the clock and where the talented may be sure they will be ignored until that time, if it ever comes, when their gifts are viable enough to be set free and survive in the world.

  The task of setting free one’s gifts was a recognized labor in the ancient world. The Romans called a person’s tutelar spirit his genius. In Greece it was called a daemon. Ancient au
thors tell us that Socrates, for example, had a daemon who would speak up when he was about to do something that did not accord with his true nature. It was believed that each man had his idios daemon, his personal spirit which could be cultivated and developed. Apuleius, the Roman author of The Golden Ass, wrote a treatise on the daemon/genius, and one of the things he says is that in Rome it was the custom on one’s birthday to offer a sacrifice to one’s own genius. A man didn’t just receive gifts on his birthday, he would also give something to his guiding spirit. Respected in this way the genius made one “genial”—sexually potent, artistically creative, and spiritually fertile.

  According to Apuleius, if a man cultivated his genius through such sacrifice, it would become a lar, a protective household god, when he died. But if a man ignored his genius, it became a larva or a lemur when he died, a troublesome, restless spook that preys on the living. The genius or daemon comes to us at birth. It carries with it the fullness of our undeveloped powers. These it offers to us as we grow, and we choose whether or not to accept, which means we choose whether or not to labor in its service. For, again, the genius has need of us. As with the elves, the spirit that brings us our gifts finds its eventual freedom only through our sacrifice, and those who do not reciprocate the gifts of their genius will leave it in bondage when they die.

  An abiding sense of gratitude moves a person to labor in the service of his daemon. The opposite is properly called narcissism. The narcissist feels his gifts come from himself. He works to display himself, not to suffer change. An age in which no one sacrifices to his genius or daemon is an age of narcissism. The “cult of genius” which we have seen in this century has nothing to do with the ancient cult. The public adoration of genius turns men and women into celebrities and cuts off all commerce with the guardian spirits. We should not speak of another’s genius; this is a private affair. The celebrity trades on his gifts, he does not sacrifice to them. And without that sacrifice, without the return gift, the spirit cannot be set free. In an age of narcissism the centers of culture are populated with larvae and lemures, the spooks of unfulfilled genii.

  I want to offer a final example of transformation and gratitude, this one at quite a different level. Meister Eckhart, the fourteenth-century Christian mystic, presents a high spiritual statement of the commerce I have tried to outline between man and spirit. The specifics are quite different, of course, but the form of the exchange is the same as with the shoemaker and the elves or with the Roman and his genius, an escalating exchange energized, on the human side, by gratitude and culminating in the realization (and freedom) of the gift. For Eck-hart, all things owe their being to God. God’s initial gift to man is life itself, and those who feel gratitude for this gift reciprocate by abandoning attachment to worldly things, that is, by directing their lives back toward God. A second gift comes to any soul that has thus emptied itself of the world— a Child is born (or the Word is spoken) in the soul emptied of “foreign images.” This gift, too, can be reciprocated, the final stage of the transformation being the soul’s entrance into the Godhead.

  Eckhart says: “That man should receive God in himself is good, and by this reception he is a virgin. But that God should become fruitful in him is better; for the fruitfulness of a gift is the only gratitude for the gift.” Eckhart is speaking his own particular language here. To understand what he means we need to know, first, that according to his theology, “God’s endeavor is to give himself to us entirely.” The Lord pours himself into the world, not on a whim or even by choice, but by nature: “I will praise him,” says this mystic, “for being of such a nature and of such an essence that he must give.”

  When Eckhart says that it is best if God becomes fruitful in man, he is commenting on a verse from the Bible which he translates as: “Our Lord Jesus Christ went up into a little castle and was received by a virgin who was a wife.” He interprets the verse symbolically: to be a “virgin” has nothing to do with carnal life but refers to “a human being who is devoid of all foreign images, and who is as void as he was when he was not yet.” A virgin is detached, someone who no longer regards the things of this life for themselves or for their usefulness. Detachment is the first station in Eckhart’s spiritual itinerary. When God finds the soul detached he enters it: “Know then, that God is bound to act, to pour himself out into thee as soon as ever he shall find thee ready … It were a very grave defect in God if, finding thee so empty and so bare, he wrought no excellent work in thee nor primed thee with glorious gifts.” When God pours himself into the soul, the Child is born, and this birth is the fruit of the gratitude for the gift.

  If a human were to remain a virgin forever, he would never bear fruit. If he is to become fruitful, he must necessarily be a wife. “Wife,” here, is the noblest name that can be given to the soul, and it is indeed more noble than “virgin.” That man should receive God in himself is good, and by this reception he is a virgin. But that God should become fruitful in him is better; for the fruitfulness of a gift is the only gratitude for the gift. The spirit is wife when in gratitude it gives birth in return and bears Jesus back into God’s fatherly heart.

  For Eckhart we are not really alive until we have borne the gift back into the Godhead. Whatever has proceeded from God comes to life, or receives its being, only at that moment when it “gazes back” toward Him. The circuit must be completed. “Man ought to be flowing out into whatever can receive him.” As in the other stories we have read, we come alive when we give away what has been received. In Eckhart the passage is purely spiritual. He tells us not to pray to God for things, because things are nothing; we should simply pray to be closer to the Godhead. The final fruit of gratitude toward God is to be drowned in Him.

  In the abstract Godhead there is no activity: the soul is not perfectly beatified until she casts herself into the desolate Deity where neither act nor form exists and there, merged in the void, loses herself: as self she perishes, and has no more to do with things than she had when she was not. Now, dead to self, she is alive in God …

  The labor of gratitude accomplishes the transformation that a gift promises. And the end of gratitude is similarity with the gift or with its donor. The gifted become one with their gifts. For Eckhart, the child born in the soul is itself a god: whoever gratefully returns all that God has bestowed will, by that act of donation, enter the Godhead.

  * Separation often involves a “cutting” ceremony rather than a gift (see Van Gennep’s remarks on divorce, for example). Going-away presents are given at the time of separation, but as the Scottish tale well illustrated, such farewells attempt to overcome the physical departure, rather than facilitate it. “My spirit goes with you,” they say. Going-away presents are gifts of spiritual incorporation.

  * Those who write on gift exchange usually mention at this point that the German word Gift means “poison.” The connection is more accidental than significant, however. The French etymologist Benveniste writes: “There is a … medical usage in which [the Greek word] dósis denotes the act of giving, whence develops the sense of the amount of medicine given, a ‘dose’ … This sense passed by loan translation into German, where Gift, like Gr.-Lat., was used as a substitute for , ‘poison’ …”

  * Few modern therapies present their teachings as gifts the way AA does. You can pay almost any amount for spiritual advice, psychotherapy, or “self-help” lessons. Despite my obvious bias, I don’t maintain that fees for such services are inappropriate. Therapists, meditation instructors, and so forth work at what they do, and they deserve to earn their keep. A lot depends on the spirit of the exchange, too; gifts will sometimes circulate above the cash.

  The AA example indicates, however, that the fee is not always a necessary part of the transaction as it is often made out to be. Further, the size of the fee is sometimes the clearest indication that the proffered teaching may not in fact lead to transformation, as when the minimum initial “donation” to the Church of Scientology is $2,700 for a 12!/i-hour “intensive.”r />
  * That the helpers are in a sort of bondage is clearer in other tales with the same motif. Several examples are cited in the notes at the end of the book.

  * As those who must worry about the livelihood of artists are fond of saying, “You cannot play ‘The Minute Waltz’ in less than a minute.” Worse (or perhaps better) you cannot write “The Minute Waltz” in less than … what? A day, a week, a year?—however long it takes. There is no technology, no time-saving device that can alter the rhythms of creative labor. When the worth of labor is expressed in terms of exchange value, therefore, creativity is automatically devalued every time there is an advance in the technology of work.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Bond

  It is the cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people, while the sale of a commodity leaves no necessary connection. I go into a hardware store, pay the man for a hacksaw blade and walk out. I may never see him again. The disconnectedness is, in fact, a virtue of the commodity mode. We don’t want to be bothered. If the clerk always wants to chat about the family, I’ll shop elsewhere. I just want a hacksaw blade.