(the) American (Novel of)

The American Guest
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ful and thankless who demand a guarantee of the absolute right. Furthermore
is not the idea of the guarantee itself derived from the thankless?
This is not a moral judgment of those without gratitude. It is to
state that gratitude, or rather a return to it, is necessary if we do not
want to submit to a culture of rights without life.
So what is there to be grateful for? Why say please and thank you
at all? If gratitude has something to recommend it to us, what could
it be?
Psycho Killers: At the Table, at the Door
Let me reiterate in different terms: living well is a matter of having
good manners—knowing the appropriate nature of please and thank
you, knowing how to say grace, knowing what gratitude is, having
grace, being grateful, developing a sense of grace. Let us propose an
example of what it might mean to live with gratitude, an example
which is not perfect, but which nevertheless might indicate some marks
of the gracious. Epictetus, who had known slavery as well as intellectual
respect in his life, had this sense of grace in mind when he wrote in
his manual, “Behave in Life as you would at a banquet.” This famous
metaphor from Epictetus illustrates a pattern that is found throughout
his manual in other images supplied by him. It of course was a way of
describing what the Stoics called “Apatheia,” or, as it is sometimes
translated, “detachment.” Is not this apatheia descriptive of a release
from the pathos of ingratitude, the disease of self-absorption in any
guise? In other words the Stoic approach was to recognize the gift in
its emphatically transitive state. This recognition hinges upon a realization
that gratitude must never presume upon the nature of the giver,
that there will always be a radical impossibility of pronouncing what is
given and what is not. The freedom of the Stoic is found in the
acceptance of this very impossibility, a gratitude for the gift of pure
life—and here the purity of it must remain essentially unknown and yet
radically gratifying. The Stoics, or at least Epictetus, were masters of
gratitude by surrendering to the unknown and unknowable gift of life.
We Americans, on the other hand, think other cultures insane for
practicing what we so clumsily call the “guest ethic.” It is a well-known
fact that in many cultures, past and present, the guest is viewed as a