Francis Bacon penned those words in his introduction to his essay on Friendship ... not his shorter essay on Love. Going to sleep, yesterday? awaking this morning? My mind continues to tease me on the meaning of Kindness. I listened to a lengthy talk by the physicist Michio Kaku last night .... talking about brains and memories and even humor. He cited someone: Do unto others before they do unto you. I hadn't heard him speak since M and I were at a meeting in Frankfort, KY, more than ten years ago. He seemed to exude -- then and now -- freundlichkeit .... a friendly and a love of Creations.
Still, I went to sleep thinking, to paraphrase the lyricist of Broadway's Oliver: where is kindness. Justice? Justice seems content to live within the framework of the Code of Talion: An eye for an eye ... or, as many commentaries would have it: the value of an eye for an eye lost.
Kindness is more than fairness ... more than a comparison of fractions .... < ..... = ..... >. Three of my grandkids were over on Friday evening. The 15 year old was not celebrating the vagaries of her High School Euclidean Geometry class. S, our Sweet Pea, S? I imagine that I owe her a great deal. I like to think that as my once-pretty-extraordinary memory became lost going into the Last Quarter, S found it. On top of that, Grandpa wrote doggerel; S is a poet. Grandpa wrote technically; S writes beautifully and has been amply recognized for her efforts. Last year, she was among a select group of kids to be presented with Gold Keys at Carnegie Hall in a national competition.
I was moved to offer her a lot more than chump-change if she could prove the converse of one of the easiest theorems given to high school kids to prove. The easy one is to show that if two sides of a triangle are equal, then the two corresponding angle bisectors are equal, too. The converse (if two angle bisectors are equal in length, then the triangle is isoceles) is not easy, at all. It was apparently first posed in 1840 and each new proof is publishable in the journals of those curious creatures, the Mathematicians.
That night, Grandpa's sleep was disturbed. Was I being Kind to see her as capable of taking on a serious problem in a field that was not her first interest? or was I being Sadistic in placing before her something that would -- knowing her -- trouble her mind until she won her many hundreds of dollars and demonstrated that she could do the proof. (Or was I being just plain old demented in forgetting that in the World of Google and Wicked-pedia, I might easily get Scroogled or Googled by a magical perusal of the relevant keywords.)
Among the greatest kindnesses in the last twenty years that I've experienced was when I presented a project to my ex-graduate school professor and closest friend for well over 40 years whose favourite expression -- or so his wife claims -- is "Are you stupid." His warm response was to fortify me in the work: "it's astounding that no one has thought of this before." Such a simple message ... such a simple kindness. Others had tried to pick at it without really giving it serious thought. I suppose, for me, the other received kindnesses that stick out in my memory are similar .... I refer to those times when I've had the experience that I was being heard. Agreed with or not agreed with but heard! And I suppose that was what my friend did for me.
Kindness? Love? Maybe they meet in listening and seeing the other ... visibility. M and I were with my friend, his wife and their grand-daughter, last night. It was Ruthie's 73rd birthday, 51 years after they married and just after the kid's 25th birthday. Four of us have some degree of hearing and processing loss and while I can't put my finger on what I mean by Kindness, there was some of it there, last night.
I'll continue working on it.
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