Dickens "moments of uncompensated kindness" AGTD p.167 Paper Penguin

[Nushra MohamedKhan]

So, just reading the papers and as always the big fat NY Times Books,
and there, a Review of a book on Kindness.

_ON KINDNESS_

By Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor

Review:  Easy to Be Hard  by PETER STEVENSON


Where does kindness fit into the chilly Freudian moonscape in which,
Phillips and Taylor write, “the pleasures of cruelty and the cruelty
of pleasures” are “touchstones of modern life”? It is a crucial
question, especially because “people first came (and continue to come)
to psychoanalysis not simply because they were more unhappy,
especially sexually unhappy, than they could bear, but because they
were not able to be as kind as they wanted to be.” There is a happy
ending: the magical kindness of childhood can evolve into a “robust”
genuine kindness if child and parent allow their relationship to
endure hatred — the kind every child feels when he realizes his parent
will not always be able to meet his needs, and the kind that parents
may feel in return. Phillips and Taylor suggest it’s not an easy
journey. Indeed, the ones who pay the largest price for our
contemporary cloak-and-dagger relationship with kindness are children,
whom adults fail by neglecting to help them “keep . . . faith with”
kindness, and thereby sentence to a life “robbed of one of the
greatest sources of human happiness.”


Fleetwood, invested with several historical figures and literary ones,
including Hawthorne's Holgrave (HSG) and the 31st President of the
United States, Herbert Hoover, is haunted and haunts AGTD. Like
Hoover, he reads Dickens. Hoover, of course, as he notes in his
memoirs and letters, was moved by Dickesn. Hoover was an orphan with
Great Expectations. Difficult to naviagate.

Keep Cool But [Kind]