We Come to Life with Those We Serve: Fulfillment through Philanthropy
128
We Come to Life with Those We Serve: Fulfillment through Philanthropy
128eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
What is the most meaningful and rewarding path in life? Many assume we enrich ourselves only by accumulating more wealth, power, and fame, or by finding new and greater forms of pleasure. In reality, we are most enriched not in taking from others but in sharing the best we have to offer through a life of service. The legendary, real-life individuals and the famous literary characters in this inspiring book show us the way: Vincent Van Gogh exemplified service through art, Benjamin Franklin dedicated his life to service of community, and the career of coach John Wooden is apt testimony to the rewards of service through education. Gunderman persuasively argues that, far from draining away our vitality, service at its best actually brings us to life.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253031020 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2021 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 128 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Richard B. Gunderman is Chancellor's Professor of Radiology, Pediatrics, Medical Education, Philosophy, Liberal Arts, Philanthropy, and Medical Humanities and Health Studies at Indiana University. He is the author of We Make a Life by What We Give.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
VICTOR
The Life Devoid of Service
LIFE IS A GIFT. NONE OF US CREATED OURSELVES OUT OF NOTHING, AND each of us is here thanks in part to circumstances far beyond our control. When sperm and egg join and a new life is created, we are not around to direct or even spectate as events unfold. So, too, development in utero takes place without our awareness. Each of us is there for birth, yet none orchestrates or even understands what is happening. Even as infants, we are helpless and utterly dependent on the care of others for food, warmth, shelter, and everything else we need to survive.
As children and adolescents, this dependence gradually diminishes somewhat over time. Yet even today, as adults, how many of us can honestly claim to be self-sufficient? Though capable of contributing to our own sustenance, we remain remarkably dependent — perhaps interdependent — on others for the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the dwellings we inhabit, and virtually every other material good on which our lives depend.
Working in a hospital, I am regularly reminded of how quickly the gift of life can be lost. Just a few weeks ago, a number of injured children were transported to our hospital's emergency department. A father had been driving children to school one morning when their vehicle was struck by another. Two of the children died within hours, and a third died in the following days. Another child will live each day of his life bearing scars of the incident, including permanent disabilities.
Such devastating incidents call to mind the fragility of existence — the fact that, in an instant, our lives can lurch in a radically different direction, or even be wrenched entirely away from us. We can take steps to protect ourselves and those we love, but even something as basic as the continuation of life is never completely in our own hands. Just a tiny alteration in the electrical rhythms of our hearts and — poof! — in the short space of a few minutes any of us can be wiped permanently from this earthly stage.
Life is something given, not something we invent, make, or own. We do not begin in a state of nonexistence or limbo and then fight our way to life. Instead, we become self-aware and live out every moment of our lives in a state of given-ness.
The principal problem with calling life a gift is a profound asymmetry between receiver and giver. We know exactly and in great detail to whom the gift has been given — to each of us. Whether we are talking about our own lives or those of our spouses, children, and friends, we know well what has been received. Less clear, however, is the source of these gifts, the benefactor.
This can make it difficult to know to whom or to what our gratitude — or in the case of deeply afflicted individuals such as Job, our outrage — should be directed. Except perhaps in the pages of sacred scriptures, the gift of life comes with no card revealing the identity and intentions of the one who gives. To some for whom the giver is unknown, it is very difficult to think of life as a gift. Even in this case, however, many are ready to admit life's given-ness.
There are countless ways by which the arc between life's giver and receiver might have been interrupted. At the very beginning, any of a number of contraceptive techniques might have been used to prevent fertilization or implantation of an egg. A pregnancy might have come to an end, either accidentally or by intention. Parents might have abandoned or even abused their offspring, or simply have parented so carelessly that life ended in infancy or childhood. With increasing age, life can be ended by its possessor, through so simple a mistake as crossing a street without looking or operating a vehicle carelessly. In some cases, people choose to take their own lives.
Science and technology have presented us with another perspective from which to view the gift of life — namely, that of the giver. One familiar example is the care we are now capable of providing infants who are born prematurely. Fifty years ago, an infant born at twenty-six or twenty-eight weeks of gestation had virtually no chance of survival. Even President John Kennedy and his wife, Jackie — parents with every advantage of wealth and power — lost such a child, their son Patrick, who was born in 1963 five and a half weeks prematurely.
Today, by contrast, new medications and support techniques have made it possible to save the lives of many such infants, allowing these tiny human beings to grow up and lead normal lives. One crucial step on this road has been the discovery and manufacture of pulmonary surfactant, a substance normally present in the lungs that dramatically decreases the amount of work required to expand them. When it is missing, infants exhaust themselves simply trying to breathe. Thanks to such new drugs, contemporary medicine is able to give many premature infants their lives back.
But the ambitions do not stop with sustaining lives that would otherwise end. Some people have called for biomedical science and technology to carry the fight farther, extending the human lifespan and perhaps even conquering mortality itself. To some — especially those most convinced of their own importance — the fact that we die represents an outrage that can undermine all enjoyment of life. Some wealthy individuals are investing heavily in just this conquest. They hope that advances in genetics, proteomics, and other biological sciences will soon make it possible to keep human beings alive far longer than ever thought possible.
Others, perhaps convinced that the biological basis of aging and death is too deeply woven into our fiber, are calling on artificial intelligence to do the same job, by making it possible to transfer a person's memory into computer circuitry. Whether or not this would represent life in any recognizable sense is open for debate, but the fundamental ambition — to take the reins of life and death into our own hands — holds immense appeal.
The urge to take ownership of life, transforming it from a gift that we receive but cannot earn into an achievement that we control, is powerful, and also venerable. It found no greater expression than in one of the very first science fiction novels ever written — Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Nowhere else has an author thought through more deeply the implications of humans becoming creators in our own right. By exploring Shelley's portrait of the ambition to seize life's reins, we can see more clearly what it means to understand life as a gift.
Shelley's monster — who unexpectedly turns out to be less the creature than the creature's creator, Victor Frankenstein — represents the antithesis of someone who experiences life as a gift. In the original sense, a monster is a portent or warning. Abnormal or especially large creatures were often regarded as signs or omens of impending disaster. Perhaps the failure to understand life as a gift — to attempt to make life purely a matter of our own will — represents one such disaster.
Mary Shelley
Before turning to the novel, it is helpful to know something of its author's life, which in many respects is no less extraordinary. Mary Shelley was born of two famously brilliant parents. Her father, William Godwin (1756–1836), was a British journalist, political philosopher, and novelist whose name is linked with the founding of utilitarianism, a school of ethical and political thought which defines as most desirable that course of action which produces the best consequences for the most people. In addition, he was an important proponent of anarchy, the view that human beings are governed best when they govern themselves through voluntary institutions. His book Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), is often regarded as the first mystery novel.
Among Godwin's regular conversation partners were many extraordinary individuals: the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the writer Charles Lamb, the American politician Aaron Burr, and the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Godwin believed in the perfectibility of human beings and human society, arguing that if the corrupting influences of society could be sufficiently reduced, evil could be expunged from human nature. He once wrote, "Perfectibility is one of the most unequivocal characteristics of the human species," perhaps helping to set the stage for his daughter's first novel.
Shelley's mother was her father's undoubted intellectual peer. Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) was an English writer and philosopher who ranks as one of history's most important advocates of women's rights. Her work A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) argues that women are naturally the equals of men and that the only reason they may appear less intelligent is the fact that they are deprived of an equal education. To realize a vision of equality, the reason of women must be as fully developed as the reason of men: "It would be an endless task to trace the variety of meanness, cares, and sorrows, into which women are plunged by the prevailing opinion that they were created rather to feel than to reason, and that all the power they obtain, must be obtained by their charms and weakness."
Like her husband, Wollstonecraft believed that human beings naturally seek the good: "No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks." If only people could see things aright, she believed, they would naturally choose what is best.
Yet for many years, Wollstonecraft's personal life gained more attention than her writings. It generally focused on two ill-fated love affairs, one of which led to the birth of her first daughter. She married Godwin in 1797, the same year she gave birth to her second daughter, Mary. She contracted childbed fever and died eleven days later at the age of thirty-eight.
The third crucial player in the drama of Mary Shelley's early life is Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), whom she married as a teenager. Born the illegitimate son of a member of Parliament, Shelley eventually matriculated at University College, Oxford, where be published a pamphlet entitled "The Necessity of Atheism," which got him expelled from the university in 1811. His father negotiated to get him reinstated on condition that Shelley recant his views, but he refused to do so. Against his father's wishes, the nineteen-year-old Shelley eloped with a sixteen-year-old boarding school student, Harriet Westbrook.
When he later met Mary through her father William Godwin, he fell madly in love with her, threatening suicide if she did not love him in return. Though he was largely unknown in his own day, today Shelley is considered one of the greatest of the Romantic poets, particularly for such works as Ozymandias and Prometheus Unbound. In what follows, both will prove significant. An excerpt from the former reads:
I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert ... Near them, on the sand,
Shelley also seems to have played an important role in shaping the economic thinking of Karl Marx, as well as the high regard for nonviolent resistance of Leo Tolstoy and Mohandas Gandhi. He died at the age of twenty-nine in what is now Italy in a boating accident.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851) grew up without her mother and burdened by a sense of responsibility for her mother's death. Mary and her older half-sister, Fanny, were raised by their father, who provided them a first-rate education. When Mary was just sixteen years old, she and Percy Shelley fell in love, soon eloping to the European Continent, along with Mary's stepsister. There they were ostracized and faced severe debts. They also suffered the loss of a daughter who was born prematurely.
While in Europe they spent a summer at Lake Geneva, Switzerland, with the notorious poet Lord Byron and his physician, John Polidori. There Byron proposed a contest to see who could write the best ghost story. Polidori rose to the occasion by crafting the first vampire story. Mary Shelley, who initially faced writer's block, eventually responded with the outlines of Frankenstein. Writing years later, she described a "waking dream" in which "I saw the pale student of the unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion. Frightful must it be, for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world." She subsequently developed the story into a novel and published it two years later in 1818, when she was twenty-one years old. Percy died just four years later. Mary raised their only surviving child, Percy Florence Shelley, and continued to write short stories, plays, essays, and biographies, dying of a brain tumor at the age of fifty-three.
Victor Frankenstein
Published anonymously, the full title of her book is Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus. Prometheus, whose name means "forethought," is the mythological ancient Greek Titan who steals fire from Zeus and gives it to proto-human creatures dwelling in the darkness of caves, thereby bringing them light and warmth, effectively conferring humanity on them. As punishment for his disobedience, Zeus has Prometheus chained to a rock, where his liver (understood to be the source of life, hence its name) is eaten every day by an eagle.
Frankenstein is an epistolary novel, written as a series of letters from a fictional character named Robert Walton to his sister. A failed writer, Walton has decided to embark on an ocean voyage to the North Pole in hopes of achieving fame by advancing scientific knowledge. During the voyage, he and his crew see a gigantic figure traveling across the ice by dogsled. Hours later, a nearly frozen and starved man who identifies himself as Victor Frankenstein appears and states that he is in pursuit of the giant. Seeing in Walton the same overarching ambition that once animated him, the convalescent Frankenstein proceeds to recount the sad, cautionary tale of his life.
Frankenstein is born to a wealthy Geneva family that encourages him to develop his passion for science. As he prepares to leave for university, his mother dies of an infectious disease, only increasing his scientific ardor. He soon begins devoting all his time and energy to developing a technique that can restore life to inanimate matter. This eventually leads him to create the creature, often in later years referred to as "Frankenstein," though never so in Shelley's novel. In an effort to surpass nature, Frankenstein makes the creature larger than life, eight feet tall. But his expectations of perfection are quickly dashed: "His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, which seemed almost of the same color as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shriveled complexion and straight black lips."
The creature he intended to be perfect, a sort of superman, proves instead to be hideous, and as soon as he sees it stir, Frankenstein flees in horror. The monster eventually teaches itself to speak and read, but all its attempts to establish human contact are thwarted by its frightening appearance. It begs Frankenstein to relieve its loneliness by creating a female companion, but the creator cannot bear the thought that such creatures might begin to propagate, and so refuses. In vengeance, the creature kills the people dearest to its maker, including Frankenstein's young brother, his best friend, and, on the night of their marriage, his new wife.
Though Frankenstein gives life to the creature, he never assumes parental responsibility for it. He refuses to raise and educate it. He never even gives it a name. Throughout the book, the creature is simply referred to as "the monster," "the fiend," "the demon," and "it." Frankenstein seems to think that the giving of life is a purely technical problem and that, disappointed by the result, he is free to abandon his creation.
The creature, on the other hand, desperately longs for a parent, someone to love and care for it. It tells Frankenstein, "Remember that I am thy creature: I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather thy fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed." What has the creature ever done to merit revulsion and abandonment? Initially nothing — like any newborn baby, the creature enters the world innocent of wrongdoing. Yet Frankenstein abhors it nonetheless, and eventually that which he spurns lashes out at him, destroying what he loves.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "We Come to Life With Those We Serve"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Richard B. Gunderman.
Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Old Stories and New Life
1. Victor: The Life Devoid of Service
2. Ivan: Death Through Self-Absorption
3. Albert: Service to the Suffering
4. Rebecca: Service to Family
5. Benjamin: Service to Community
6. Alexander: Service through Suffering
7. John: Service through Education
8. Bill: Service through Commerce
9. Ebenezer: The Spirit of Service
10. Vincent: Service through Art
Afterword: The Life of Service