Unlike the sale of a commodity, the giving of a gift tends to establish a relationship between the parties involved. When gifts circulate within a group, their commerce leaves a series of interconnected relationships in its wake, and a kind of decentralized cohesiveness emerges.
Interpretation
Gifts create and strengthen bonds between people, unlike mere transactions.
In this quote, Lewis Hyde highlights the significance of gift-giving as a means of fostering relationships. Unlike commercial transactions that are often impersonal and transactional in nature, the act of giving a gift involves the establishment of connections and interdependencies among individuals, leading to a cohesive community where relationships thrive through generosity and reciprocity.
In practice
During a wedding speech, one might use this quote to emphasize the importance of gifts in building relationships among family and friends.
All that we make and do is shaped by the communities and traditions that contain us, not to mention by money, power, politics, and luck. And even should the artist or scientist think she has extracted herself from the world to stand alone in the studio, a tremendous array of faculties and mind-states may well attend her creativity.
Better to operate with detachment, then; better to have a way but infuse it with a little humor; best, to have no way at all but to have instead the wit constantly to make one's way anew from the materials at hand.
But neither money nor machines can create. They shuttle tokens of energy, but they do not transform. A civilization based on them puts people out of touch with their creative powers.
Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.
An essential portion of any artist’s labor is not creation so much as invocation. Part of the work cannot be made, it must be received; and we cannot have this gift except, perhaps, by supplication, by courting, by creating within ourselves that ‘begging bowl’ to which the gift is drawn.
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.
People who have no secrets from each other never want for a subject of conversation. They do not weigh their words, for there is nothing to be held back, neither do they seek for something to say. They talk out of the abundance of their heart, without consideration they say just what they think. Blessed are they who attain to such familiar, unreserved intercourse with God.
People don't contest that I'm British as a black man, but they do contest that I'm English. Too many people are going back to an ethnocentric idea of what being English means.
Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.
You can find women who have never had an affair, but it is hard to find a woman who has had just one.
You don't need to be told some things. You can sometimes tell more by a man's silence and the set of his head than by what he says.
When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion.
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