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.
What's this? That little red-haired girl dropped her pencil... Gee... It's got teeth marks all over it... She nibbles her pencil... She's human!
Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones. They begin to tell you what's sensible and what's foolish, and want you to stick at home all the time. I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody.
Whatever be the qualities of the man with whom a woman is united according to the law, such qualities even she assumes, like a river, united with the ocean.
For some reason, we can't just enjoy somebody else's success. Somehow, that's going to affect us. If they have more, then I have less - and I don't know why.
Here's to woman! Would that we could fold into her arms without falling into her hands.
People may or may not say what they mean... but they always say something designed to get what they want.
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