Principle 2: When we act with hospitality and friendship we enrich ourselves and others. When we refuse to interact with others for superficial reasons, we throw away gems.
1.
Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond was actually on a plot of land that his friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson, owned. Emerson's house was not far away.
One day Thoreau decided to venture to his friend's house to hang out. He walked in, said Hello Ralph, then sat down and picked up the New York Times. Emerson was working on a sermon, busy writing, thinking, reading. They hardly spoke. After a while, Emerson's wife brought in some coffee and blueberry muffins, not dissimilar to the ones we serve.
Coffee turned into lunch... lunch turned into dinner. Thoreau helped with some gardening around the house, helped cook dinner, then said goodbye. See you next time, Henry, Emerson replied.
To Thoreau, this was the pinnacle of friendship and hospitality, and it had a lasting impression on him. Nothing was expected. Everything had a certain purity. They didn't feel the need to gossip. They didn't feel the need to impress. They didn't feel any need to perform. They merely existed, as a type of family. Emerson and his wife, Lidian, were particularly good at creating this sense of warmth.
It wasn't accidental, and it wasn't just with Thoreau. Nathaniel Hawthorne loved to stay with Emerson. He found it helped him write, and eventually moved in next door. Louis May Alcott, who wrote Little Women, felt the same and moved to the neighborhood as well. The hospitality of Ralph and Lidian drew people in. They practiced hospitality, they studied it, and perfected it.
Indeed, today, many scholars believe that it was Emerson and Lidian's warmth, friendship, hospitality that made the intellectual awakening called Transcendentalism possible.
2.
Emerson was a Christian minister, yet his conception of hospitality was heavily influenced by the Qur'an. One of Emerson's favorite lines from the Qur'an is:
"I was a gem concealed;
Me my burning ray revealed."
That is: Here is this person, this human, concealed. They might be concealed by the wrong clothes, by the wrong politics, by the wrong ethnicity. Those are merely judgements in the eye of the onlooker. One can also be concealed because they have never been revealed.
Emerson believed that hospitality uncovered gems, brought out the best elements of a person, but also revealed a kindness built into humans, in both parties. He writes in his essay "Friendship":
"We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken... the whole human family is bathed with an element of love like a fine ether. How many persons we meet in houses, whom we scarcely speak to, whom yet we honor, and who honor us!... The effect of the indulgence of this human affection is... [often in poetry] likened to the material effects of fire...."
What he means is this: There are often kind words, compliments that we would like to say, but do not. We don't say them for a variety of reasons. We should assume, according to Emerson, an unspoken kindness in our daily interactions, that the other person, instead of being shy or mean, actually has a well of kindness for us, and that we do for them. When we act as if that's true, it becomes true.
3.
Emerson believed that practicing hospitality was nourishing to all people involved. The Stoics believed something similar. They believed in a force of goodness that we create when we actively try to be humane, when we try to be friends, when we give hospitality.
Yet we often choose friends for reasons other than friendship. Perhaps we want some gain, or we want to avoid a loss in reputation. That is not immoral, but it shows a that one has not tapped into the emotion of friendship and hospitality. Cicero writes:
"Most people are not prepared, in their daily lives, to accept that anything can be good unless it is a source of profit. [Those who choose friends that way] will miss the finest and most natural sort of friendship; I mean the sort which is desirable for its own sake and for itself."
When Cicero says friendship in this case he means general kinship, the bonds we form with people we see infrequently and for short periods, such as at a favorite restaurant, as well as true, long term friendship.
There is a certain pleasure we get when we purposely do not ask about a person's past, when we purposely see the positive in what could be bad, when we do not collect friends as a politician does, but rather merely accept somebody in front of us as one of us.
We can be different. We can have opposing views. We can have vices. None of that matters if we meet as equals, in the sense that we merely want to be friendly. Cicero writes that this feeling, this happiness, as he calls it, "is the summit of our best ambitions."
It is the summit of our best ambition because as the Stoics believed, and as Emerson did as well, when we act with warmth--with hospitality, a general sense of friendship--we create a powerful energy inside of us, and inside of the other person, that has reverberating positive effects.
To the Stoics, these reverberating positive effects lead to great philosophy, to great military victories, to great political ideas. They are the burning rays that eventually uncover gems.
4.
Hospitality is a form of friendship, but this does not mean that we have to like everybody, nor that we have to let people treat us meanly and not react.
What it means, as a practical matter for daily life today, is that we should be actively friendly with anybody in front of us, that we should try to put aside all differences and focus on the task at hand.
We cannot control the other person, but we can control our words and actions. Even in tough situations-- such as with an angry customer or argumentative relative-- if we use hospitality, the other person will eventually be better off, and we will be too.
Principle 2: When we act with hospitality and friendship we enrich ourselves and others. When we refuse to interact with others for superficial reasons, we throw away gems.
Very best wishes from
your friend,
William