Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • The American Scholar

    On Kindness

    Dec 01, 2021 3 minutes
    EDWARD HOAGLAND

    KINDNESS IS KINSHIP, and like humor is expansive. An arm over the shoulder, a voice in one’s ear. Overlapping sensibilities make us feel good and can correct for misperceptions. Empathy then seeps into our calculation. We feel better, as though we may have banked some credit, some wiggle room for the future. Wealth of a sort. Bigheartedness wins over pettiness. Heartburn declines. But kindness can be fleeting, whereas compassion implies a deeper level of understanding, befitting commitment. We wish to be kind. Like generosity, kindness recalls the Golden Rule. One hand washes

    You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

    More from The American Scholar

    The American Scholar4 min read
    Commonplace Book
    To Err Is Human; to Forgive, Supine —S. J. Perelman, Baby, It’s Cold Inside, 1970 You must know the bees have come early this year too: I see them visit aster, sweet Williams, bleeding hearts, and azalea blossoms hardy enough to not have crisped with
    The American Scholar17 min read
    Tramping With Virginia
    Emily Fox Gordon is the author of two memoirs, two novels, and a collection of essays, Book of Days. Her second novel, Madeleine and Jane, was published last September. I’m a devoted fan of Virginia Woolf ’s essay “Street Haunting.” For many years, I
    The American Scholar5 min read
    Acting Out
    In 1922, the Franco-British theater visionary Michel Saint-Denis, then 25 years old, asked Constantin Stanislavsky, the founder of the Moscow Art Theatre, how he had made the character Madame Ranyevskaya drop a cup of hot tea so realistically in Act

    Related