The Ramblr

Counterfeit charity

As we were walking away from a tobacconist’s, my friend carefully sorted out his change: into his left vest pocket he slipped the small gold coins, into his right vest pocket the small silver coins; into the left pocket of his pants, a handful of large copper coins, and finally into his right pant’s pocket, a two franc silver piece he had examined with particular attention.

“A singular and meticulous division!” I said to myself.

We encountered a poor man who tremblingly held out his hat to us. — I know nothing more disquieting than the mute eloquence of those supplicating eyes, which contain at one and the same time so much humility and so many reproaches, at least for the sensitive man who knows how to read them. He finds something approaching these depths of complicated emotion in the tearful eyes of dogs being beaten.

My friend’s offering was much larger than my own, and I said to him: “You are right: next to the pleasure of being astonished, there is none greater than causing surprise.” “It was the counterfeit coin,” he replied tranquilly, as if to justify his prodigality.

But into my miserable brain, always missing the obvious (what a tiresome faculty nature made me a gift of!), entered suddenly the idea that such conduct on the part of my friend was only excusable on the grounds of a desire to create an event in the life of that poor devil, perhaps even to learn the diverse consequences, whether deadly or otherwise, that a counterfeit coin might produce in the hands of a beggar. Might it not be converted into real coins? Might it not also lead him into prison? A publican or a baker might, for example, have him arrested as a counterfeiter or as a passer of counterfeit coins. But the counterfeit coin might also just as well serve as the seed for several day’s wealth, in the hands of a poor, small-scale speculator. And so my fancy played itself out, lending wings to the spirit of my friend and drawing all possible deductions from all possible hypotheses.

But he brusquely broke my reverie by repeating my very words: “Yes, you are right: there is no pleasure sweeter than surprising a man by giving him more than he had hoped for.”

I gazed into the whites of his eyes, and I was appalled to see that his eyes were shining with an incontestable candor. I then saw clearly that he had wanted to both perform a charitable act and make a good deal at the same time — to gain forty sous and the heart of God; to get into paradise economically; finally, to earn for free the badge of a charitable man. I might almost have pardoned him for the desire for criminal enjoyment of which I had just recently supposed him capable. I would have found it curious and singular that he amused himself by compromising the poor, but I could never pardon him for the ineptness of this calculation. One is never excused for being evil, but there is some merit in knowing that one is — and the most irreparable of vices is to do evil through stupidity.

[Charles Baudelaire, “La Fausse Monnaie” in Paris Spleen (online version here)]

A Life Worth Living

[In] the 1960s […] I was pastor of a very poor, very black, inner city parish in Brooklyn, New York. I had read that week an article by Ashley Montagu of Princeton University on what he called “A Life Worth Living.” He listed the qualifications for a life worth living: good health, a stable family, economic security, educational opportunity, the prospect of a satisfying career to realize the fullness of one’s potential. These were among the measures of what was called “a life worth living.”

And I remember vividly, as though it were yesterday, looking out the next Sunday morning at the congregation of St. John the Evangelist and seeing all those older faces creased by hardship endured and injustice afflicted, and yet radiating hope undimmed and love unconquered. And I saw that day the younger faces of children deprived of most, if not all, of those qualifications on Prof. Montagu’s list. And it struck me then, like a bolt of lightning, a bolt of lightning that illuminated our moral and cultural moment, that Prof. Montagu and those of like mind believed that the people of St. John the Evangelist—people whom I knew and had come to love as people of faith and kindness and endurance and, by the grace of God, hope unvanquished—it struck me then that, by the criteria of the privileged and enlightened, none of these my people had a life worth living. In that moment, I knew that a great evil was afoot.

[Richard John Neuhaus]

Books and men

If I had been asked in my early youth whether I preferred to have dealings only with men or only with books, my answer would certainly have been in favor of books. In later years this has become less and less the case. Not that I have had so much better experiences with men than with books; on the contrary, purely delightful books even now come my way more often than purely delightful men. But the many bad experiences with men have nourished the meadow of my life as the noblest book could not do, and the good experiences have made the earth into a garden for me.

[…]

Here is an infallible test. Imagine yourself in a situation where you are alone, wholly alone on earth, and you are offered one of the two, books or men. I often hear men prizing their solitude, but that is only because there are still men somewhere on earth, even though in the far distance. I knew nothing of books when I came forth from the womb of my mother, and I shall die without books, with another human hand in my own. I do, indeed, close my door at times and surrender myself to a book, but only because I can open the door again and see a human being looking at me.

[Martin Buber, “Books and Men.” Pointing the Way: Collected Essays, 1957. Trans. Maurice Friedman.]