Topic

Help

Service defines this collection's ethos: every major thinker represented here who was asked what life is for gave some version of the same answer. Tolstoy — the vocation of every man and woman is to serve. King — life's most urgent question is what are you doing for others. Mother Teresa — you can do things I cannot do, together we can do great things. Lincoln on the right to criticize belonging only to those with the heart to help: this is the condition the collection sets on all judgment. Wilde, characteristically, deploys the same insight from the other side: the only thing to do with good advice is pass it on, since it is never of any use to oneself. Ebner-Eschenbach's those-who-hold-us-up hold us up — the reciprocity is structural, not optional. The anonymous nobody-too-rich-to-not-need-help-nobody-too-poor-to-not-give is the most egalitarian formulation: help is not the relationship of the sufficient to the insufficient but the condition of all human relationships without exception. The collection argues that helping is not a supplement to a life well lived but the description of what a life well lived consists in.