Shameless Plug for My Favorite Book #1 - Selfishness and Honesty
This is a description of the author’s 6th birthday. Since I pulled a nearly identical move at the same kind of party and our birthdays are one day apart, I empathize:
“I was immensely proud – it seems to me that all my life I have taken the most pride in things over which I have little or no control. Even though I had older sisters, it never occurred to me that anyone had ever become six years old before, and the splendid cake, candles bravely ablaze in salute to my maturity, was ample evidence that I had entered into manhood.
Having blown out the candles, and, as a side benefit, managing to send most of the smoke up my little brother’s nostrils, I was handed the knife, my first baton of any kind of authority in six misspent years, and was told to cut as large a piece as I liked. At this point Daffy Duck must have had, for me, his earliest beginnings, because I found to my surprise and pleasure that I had no desire to share my cake with anyone. I courteously returned the knife to my mother. I had no need for it, I explained; I would simplify the whole matter by taking the entire cake for myself. Not knowing she had an incipient duck on her hands, she laughed gently and tried to return the knife to my reluctant grasp. I again explained that the knife was superfluous. It was impossible, I pointed out, with incontrovertible logic, to cut a cake and still leave it entire for its rightful owner. I had no need and no desire to share.
My father thereupon mounted the hustings (he was nine feet tall and looked like a moose without antlers to me) and escorted me to my room to contemplate in cakeless solitude the meaning of a new word: “selfish.” To me then, and to Daffy Duck now, “selfish” means “honest but antisocial”; “unselfish” means “socially acceptable but often dishonest.” We all want the whole cake, but unlike Daffy, and at least one six-year old boy, the coward in the rest of us keeps the Daffy Duck, the small boy in us, under control.
“You may cut as large a piece as you want” is a dangerous euphemism. There is a prescribed wedge on every birthday cake that is completely and exactly surrounded by corporal punishment. Exceeding these limits by even a thousandth o fan inch brands one as “selfish.” From my seventh birthday on, I learned to approach with judgement sharper than a razor’s edge this line, without cutting the “un” from “unselfish” to “selfish.” I learned very little about social morality, but a great deal about survival, and this, after all, is what Daffy Duck is all about.”
1 year ago • 0 notes