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Be Kind, Be Kind, Be Kind

Jonathan Lethem

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4 min read

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2 days ago

Henry James, Mr. Rogers, and the Long Middle

Henry James; post by Rob Reynolds; Mr. Rogers and a friend soak their feet on a hot day (kindness embodied)

This quote floats around: be kind, be kind, be kind. I’ve seen it on a poster at my kids’ grade school.

It distills a longer quote, one which has been attributed to the novelist Henry James, and then later to Mr. Rogers:

from Quote Investigator website

When you dig a bit deeper, it seems reliably to come from Henry James. Mr. Rogers even attributed it to James when he first said it aloud.

The repetition, the clarity, the slight twist of the non-variation where you might expect a variation — all these make it a “sticky” quote, in either the long or the short version. Employing the “rule of three”, like a good joke, the six-word rendition tends to hold like a mantra in the brain. Anyway, that’s how it feels to me. I walk around with it. On my best days it provides a check on my own churlish impulses — those that are too well fed by my childhood obsession with Mad Magazine’s Al Jaffee’s Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions.

In fact, I think about it so much that I may have overthought it. Why the three injunctions, where one would do?

One day it popped into my head that the three might represent, in some sublimated way, the “three ages of man” (which we might prefer now to call the “three ages of the human”). Infancy, decrepitude, and all that comes in-between — life itself, the long middle.

Orson Welles has a quote which circulates sometimes (and gets chopped up and attributed to others — or, very possibly, it doesn’t really originate with Welles):

“We come into the world alone, we die alone, we live alone. Love and friendship is the nearest thing that we can find to create the illusion that we are not totally alone.”

Welles’ rhetorical rule of three here brings the “ages of man” triad up into the light. Babies, people, and the elderly; beginning, middle, end.

What if Henry James had the same thing on his mind?

It’s pretty easy to be kind to babies. I mean, if you’re not a sociopath. We don’t usually hand out a lot of ethical extra credit for demonstrations of kindness to infants, or little children. It’s our basic threshold for humanity.

Similarly, only monsters are unkind to the elderly — the diminished and infirm, the dying. In fact, even elderly criminals can begin to draw sympathy and gentleness out of us, when they age beyond a certain point, into utter helplessness and incomprehension, behind prison walls.

But it’s the third “be kind” that’s hard to honor in our daily walking-around lives: Kindness to others in the middle of the journey from childhood to the grave.

I was just reading Kyle Minor’s terrific, galvanizing new sequence of essays, How to Disappear and Why (forthcoming) and I came across a fine expression of this same distinction. (Minor, it should be said, writes from the perspective of a person who suffered immensely in their childhood, and has a deep sympathy for the pain of children):

“If the beginning of life and the end of life are not good, it might be beyond anyone’s ability to do anything about it, because our lives in those fragile states are so often beyond our control. But what if, in between the bad, we could seize the middle? Isn’t the middle, if we live long enough, the most of it? And what if, for whatever reason — fate, circumstance, the impositions of others, our own choices, our own failures — we couldn’t seize the middle? Could a story — not a cheap story, something real, something as wild and unlikely as life itself — redeem the middle? Redeem the whole? Peel off a little piece somewhere?”

Being kind to the other middle-journeyers we meet on our path, the other adults — seeing them with compassion, seeing them as subject to what Kyle Minor lists above — “fate, circumstance, the imposition of others, (their) own choices, (their) own failures” — to the same extent that we expect ourselves to view children and the elderly with compassion — isn’t that the most difficult thing?

I’m not going to give evidence here of the failure of this injunction, James’ middle injunction to kindness. That evidence is unfortunately everywhere.

And yet the long middle, that’s where most of us are at, by the time we’re able to command our ethical lives, and before we surrender our grip on all things. The long middle: that’s the test, isn’t it? Be kind.