Malefactor, at .40 nap, lamented the disturbance of silence; it set off a chain of thought that lead to this post.
Nothing exceptionally special happens on the Friday before Christmas, be it in 2005 or 1005. This past Christmas was no different. I was at the only bookshop in Singapore – Border’s doesn’t count – amid the throng, mindfully aware that it was the day before Christmas Eve; in order to validate my participation in this annual orgy of consumerism, I always, always, year after year, purchase books to offer as gifts.
I do so with Adorno’s lament in Minima Moralia echoing in my cavernous mind:
No exchanges allowed. – Human beings are forgetting how to give gifts. Violations of the exchange-principle have something mad and unbelievable about them; here and there even children size up the gift-giver mistrustfully, as if the gift were only a trick, to sell them a brush or soap. [...] Even private gift-giving has degenerated into a social function, which one carries out with a reluctant will, with tight control over the pocketbook, a skeptical evaluation of the other and with the most minimal effort.
Real gift-giving had its happiness in imagining the happiness of the receiver. It meant choosing, spending time, going out of one’s way, thinking of the other as a subject: the opposite of forgetfulness. Hardly anyone is still capable of this. In the best of cases, they give what they themselves would have wished for, only a few shades of nuance worse.
To be sure, Adorno should never be read literally; less so the “reflections from a damaged life”. But, to speculate, this is the truth of the Seasonal act; the trauma of giving, the de-subjectivization of each gift. This Christmas, for my 15 year old niece, I took it upon her to give Umberto Eco’s The name of the Rose, in full certainty that she will not comprehend the myriad of intimations within. Perhaps, the sense of Eco will surface during her University studies; perhaps, this sense of literature will imbue her with a literary sense. For if reading is an act of exploration, an extending of our mental horizon, then books as gifts act as beacons to guide that path.
