填空题
[A] How to understand generosity
[B] One way is to stick to your words
[C] The true essence of generosity
[D] Being generous needs thoughts
[E] Never use generosity as a disguise
[F] Small things reflect more
The word "gift" has got dangerously devalued of late. Salesmen use so-called free gifts as bait and publicists use them as bribes; the wealthy can make "gifts" to their children, or to charities, with no more noble motive than saving tax.
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We need to claim the word back this Christmas. We also need to claim back the word "generous": which too often gets used in the senses of over-large portions of food, hotel towels, the size of sheets, or women spilling out of their dresses. For generosity--the ability to make real gifts with modesty and love, expecting nothing back--is one of the things which most make us human. You do not find pigs or lions giving ,one another thoughtful little presents, do you Monkeys, apparently, offer one another fleas at times, but not in any provable spirit of kindliness. We should honor generosity more than we do.
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Perhaps it has become suspect because of the tales of over-the-top generosity sometimes told in gossip about the very rich. The late Christina Onassis giving her daughter a personal zoo and a flock of sheep with their own shepherd, for instance ; assorted tycoons flying their guests halfway round the world for birthday parties where there is an emerald bracelet or cufflinks on every place-setting. In this context, generosity has come to mean that you hurl money around like a drunken sailor. And there is always the suspicion that, like the sailor, you are doing it just to prove that you can afford it. That is not giving: that is showing off.
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But the real thing, when you meet it, is magical, and as a quality it belongs equally to rich and poor. Sometimes the poor--like the widow in the Bible who gave her mite--are best at it. Travelers in remote parts, from Poland to Peru, come home with stories of bread, shelter, even beds shared without question with the stranger on the peasant principle that "A guest in the house is God in the house". Nearer home, I loved the stories collected in memory of Katie Sullivan, the 23-year-old mental home care; assistant who was murdered last year. Particularly the one about the day she was walking to the pub, and lagged behind, and her student friends caught a glimpse of her emptying her whole purse into a tramp’s hands when she thought they weren’t looking. Later in the pub they teased her about not drinking, trying to make her admit what she had done; but she steadfastly pretended she didn’t want a drink.
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Tact is the key to real generosity: tact, and real thought for the person you are giving the present to. You can buy anyone a picture by a fashionable and expensive artist, if you can afford it; but it might be kinder to spend a tenth of the amount--and a bit of trouble on getting the framed original of a cartoon you know has cheered them up at a bad time. Anyone can buy a man a gold watch; but it takes a generous wife to do what one lately did, and track down an antique gold strap which precisely fits the old one he inherited from his beloved father.
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In the Agatha Christie novel The Hollow, Henrietta displays remarkable kindness towards a shy unintellectual woman who isn’t fitting in to a sparkling house party. Greta is wearing a dreadful cardigan she knitted herself; Henrietta not only praises it, but asks for the pattern. Having got the pattern, moreover, she heroically knits the dreadful thing and wears it herself next time she meets Greta. That is what I call follow-through. So is the wedding present a friend got from a broke but domestic sister-in-law : she promised to bake her a loaf of special, delicious whole meal bread every week for the first year of her marriage, and did so.