To be fully aware of the forces playing out around and through us means that we will be aware of those gifts around us that remain un-given.

I love it!

I've posting it in the Quote of the Day thread. I hope I'm right in attributing it solely to David Braden; please let me know if there were any other co-authors (Aristotle, Shakespeare, the Dalai Lama, whoever) and I'll edit my post accordingly.

BTW. I didn't quite know why I had included Aristotle as a possible co-author and wondered if I should change the name to someone else, so I googled and found this book about gifts: The Question of the Gift. So, citing this extract from the abstract, it seems as if Aristotle might be quite relevant after all:

Martha Woodruff argues that Aristotle's writings on friendship provide a necessary supplement to Nietzsche's gift-giving virtue, which speaks too little about receiving gifts as well as giving them.

Has anyone read The Question of the Gift? The reference to Yunxiang Yan interested me:

Yunxiang Yan's fieldwork in Chinese villages led to his important recent book The Flow of Gifts; his contribution to this collection summarizes and extends that book's significant findings about prestige and asymmetrical relationships.

I remember being deeply moved by reading, on O.net I think, a description of the gratitude felt by these villagers (?) towards the unknown person/people from faraway who had come and to help them. I can't quite recall the exact wording, but I'm fairly sure it was Yunxiang Yan. Can anyone help me about this?