Passage 7

I dated a woman for a while—a literary type, well-read, lots of books in her place—whom I admired a bit too extravagantly, and one Christmas I decided to give her something unusually nice and, I’m afraid, unusually expensive. I bought her a set of Swift’s Works—not just any set but a scarce early-eighteenth-century edition; then I wrapped each leather-bound volume separately and made a card for each volume, each card containing a carefully chosen quotation from Swift himself. I thought it was terribly romantic; I had visions of her opening the set, volume by volume, while we sat by the fire Christmas Eve sipping cognac and listening to the Brandenburg Concertos.

How stupid I am sometimes! She, practical woman that should have known she was, had bought me two pairs of socks and a shirt, plus a small volume of poems by A. R. Ammons. She cried when she opened the Swift. I thought they were tears of joy, but they weren’t. “I can’t accept this,” she said. “It’s totally out of proportion.” She insisted that I take the books back or sell them or keep them for myself. When I protested she just got more upset, and finally she asked me to leave and to take the books with me. Hurt and perplexed, I did. We stopped seeing each other soon after that. It took me weeks to figure out what I had done wrong. “There’s a goat in all of us,” R. P. Blackmur wrote somewhere, “a stupid, stubborn goat.”

To my credit, I’m normally more perspicacious about the gifts I give, and less of a show-off, But I have it in me, obviously, to be, as my ex-girlfriend said, totally out of proportion: to give people things I can’t afford, or things that betoken an intimacy that doesn’t exist, or things that bear no relation to the interests or desires of the person I’m giving them to. I’ve kicked myself too often not to know it’s there, this insensitivity to the niceties of gift-giving.

The niceties, of course, not the raw act of giving (and certainly not the thought) are what count. In most cultures, most of them more sensible than our own, the giving of gifts is highly ritualistic―that is, it is governed by rules and regulations; it is under strict social control. It is also, more or less explicitly, an exchange. None of this giving with no thought of receiving; on the contrary, you give somebody something and you expect something back in return―maybe not right away but soon enough. And it is expected to be of more or less equivalent value; you can be fairly certain that nobody is going to one-up you with something really extravagant like a scarce set of Swift, or else turn greedy on you and give you a penny whistle in return for a canoe. And once that’s under control, the giving and receiving of gifts is free to become ceremonious, an occasion for feasting and celebration. You can finish your cognacs, in other words, and get down to the real business of the evening.

What kind of a Christmas Eve did the author expect when he bought his date a set of Swift’s Works?

Why did the author’s date cry when she opened the Swift?

What’s the basic rule for gift giving?