Reflections on My 40 Years in Umbria

I found much of interest in a New York Times book review of "The Gift of Thanks" today. The book is already on my winter reading list. A few excerpts from the review:

"Ms. Visser writes with as much scholarly wit about dinner and dinner parties — what we put in our mouths, and why and with whom — as any writer alive. She was a foodie before everyone was, and the author of the authoritative books “Much Depends on Dinner” (1988) and “The Rituals of Dinner” (1991), each of which is as crisp and tasty as the day it was published.

author Margaret Visser

The not-very-promising title of Ms. Visser’s new book, “The Gift of Thanks: The Roots and Rituals of Gratitude,” and the fact that it is being issued in November, will make some readers think it’s another snoozy, belt-loosening tour of America’s Thanksgiving traditions, from the Pilgrims to whether it’s the L-tryptophan in turkey that makes you want to crawl under the table and take a nap on the carpet after eating.

It’s not that at all. Instead “The Gift of Thanks” is a scholarly, many-angled examination of what gratitude is and how it functions in our lives. Gratitude is a moral emotion of sorts, Ms. Visser writes, one that is more complicated and more vital than we think.

English speakers are obsessed with the terms “thanks” or “thank you.” We often say these words more than 100 times a day, she writes, in a flurry that many other cultures find baffling.

The notion that we should thank others is not hard-wired into our brains, but learned from our parents. For a child, she writes, “the first unprompted ‘thank you’ is momentous enough to count as a kind of initiation into a new level of human consciousness.” In people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, little words like “thanks,” she notes, “often survive the shipwreck of all other memories.”

In “The Gift of Thanks,” however, Ms. Visser is most interested in the kind of gratitude that is not compulsory or self-interested. She writes about the humility required to be genuinely grateful, and the essential ability to climb out of one’s own head.

“Gratitude is always a matter of paying attention,” she writes, of “deliberately beholding and appreciating the other.”

Gratitude is, fundamentally, about not taking things for granted, a kind of worldview. “Gratitude arises from a specific circumstance — being given a gift or done a favor — but depends less upon that,” Ms. Visser writes, “than on the receiver’s whole life, her character, upbringing, maturity, experience, relationships with others, and also on her ideals, including her idea of the sort of person she is or would like to be.”

May I always possess the requisite humility to experience true gratitude.