I’ve decided to invest in the economy of praise. Here’s how it works: every day, you find a reason to lavish praise on someone with no expectation of return. (If you’re an editor, or a professor, this may go against your natural instincts. But like grant-writing or personal hygiene, it’s a skill that can be learned.) You do this every day for the rest of your life. Once a week, you write a poem in praise of the spider that weaves outside your window or the bird that eats it. Once a month, you go out of your way to recommend a book to a student. (Not your own.) Once a year, you write a glowing review. If you’re wise enough to praise the young, then they weep at your funeral. The spider and the bird remain neutral.
Not only does this strike me as a better investment than those offered by other economies at the moment, but it raises interesting questions. For example, why, when you praise someone, do they flush and look away as if you’ve just slapped them? Try it. (I’ll wait.)
Is praise such a shameful pleasure? If so, then we might cultivate interesting new forms of perversion: the sadism of praise. Imagine that you’re John Malkovich as you pay someone a compliment. Like shooting them with an arrow made of honey. If this is true, then God must look like St. Sebastian. The agony! No wonder we often feel abandoned. After so many centuries of praise, God’s just too embarrassed to show his face.
Praise, one might say, is the economics of the soul. It’s the currency of faith: we praise, you raise. But it’s also the basic unit of culture: art, literature, and learning begin with praise. Yet it’s too seldom part of our daily life, especially in the literary world. There are prizes, of course, but as we know, those are political. There are good reviews, but that’s business. There’s posthumous fame, but that’s just ritual cannibalism. Let me be clear: I’m not suggesting that we abandon critical standards, or the mutual dashing of muffins to the ground by writers who openly loathe each other at Yaddo. I’m simply saying that in these uncertain times, we might be wise to begin making longer term investments. What sends us back to Donne or Donatello year after year? It’s an elevation of spirit that might have begun in the crude economics of patronage but quickly tosses that history aside to show itself as fierce as the spider or the bird. And so what can we do but praise?