On Hospitality

On hospitality, we can learn a lot from Robert Frost.

“Good fences make good neighbors,” says the gruff fellow in Frost’s poem “Mending Wall,” as he and the speaker engage in what seems like a pointless ritual every year after the spring thaw. They walk along the wall between their properties, and replace the stones that have fallen, some by the boisterousness of hunters, but most by the mysterious working of nature. For, the speaker says, “Something there is that does not love a wall, / That wants it down.” And why should he and the neighbor have any wall? “There where it is we do not need the wall,” says the speaker, as “He is all pine and I am apple orchard.” But in fact, it is not good for apple trees to have pine trees too nearby; the pine needles can make the soil too acidic, and pines are great users of water. I am not sure whether the apples tend to work any harm on the pines. In any case, the speaker looks down on his neighbor a bit, saying, as the man carries a large hunk of rock, that he appears like “an old stone savage, armed.” But the neighbor repeats the saying that his father used to say, and they are the last words in the poem, “Good fences make good neighbors.” Frost thus leaves the two attitudes in tension.

The wall-building need not be taken as an act of restrained hostility. It may be taken as an act of honoring boundaries, and in that sense it is a form of deference to your neighbor. The old Romans, in their early days as an agrarian people, as they had a god for everything traditional, had also a god for boundary stones: Terminus. It is not hard to see why farmers need boundary stones. Unscrupulous neighbors might otherwise encroach on their land, perhaps to divert or dam an important stream, and all at once real hostility will erupt. I have been told that one of the things that puts a spoke in the wheels of economic prosperity in some nations is uncertainty regarding ownership of land. Such uncertainty leaves people wary and unlikely to make improvements on land that might not be their own after all, or that might be taken from them even if it is their own. But beyond the matter of real estate, boundaries – walls – are indispensable for art, for science, for healthy social interchange, and for the moral and religious life itself. They are in fact constitutive of creation.

“Here shall your proud waves be stayed,” says God to the surging of the sea; “thus far shall you go, and no farther” (Job 38:11). God creates not by confusing but by distinguishing: “God separated the light from the darkness” (Gen. 1:4); he separated the waters above the firmament from the waters below (1:7); he separated the sea from the dry land (1:9); he “made the beasts of the field according to their kinds” (1:25), and all the birds and fish and other animals also; and within the human race itself, the sacred author marks the blessed division: “Male and female he created them” (1:27). For “God is not the author of confusion” (1 Cor. 14:33). Indeed, if confusion is your aim, you create nothing; you miscreate or uncreate.

For the moral law is not distinguishable from being. To all that God makes in the beginning, he gives the judgment that it is good: and we mistake badly if we consider the goodness as merely instrumental toward some purpose, or if we attribute the judgment as describing only God’s pleasure. The Hebrew words we translate as “that it was good,” ki tov, are precisely the same as are uttered in several of the most glorious psalms of praise, but there they are spoken of God himself: “Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good” (Ps. 116:1; Hebrew ki tov). It is good that birds are birds and not fish; it is good that sheep are sheep and not lions; and, within the human race, it is good that man is man and not woman, and that woman is woman and not man, so that we can perceive that they are made mutually for one another, essentially, and not by circumstance, and certainly not by feelings that can flare and fade in the wind, or by social customs that may be good or evil.

All moral laws, not only those that regard sex, are walls, not just to include some actions and exclude others. They constitute the social body: they clothe it in flesh. It does not take much imagination to see what happens when, in principle, the laws are denied. It is like sawing through the supporting beams of a house, which then groans in the wind and begins to lean. In the end you have no house at all, only a heap of wooden and stone oddments that used to be a house, a place not fit for human habitations, though the rats may like it well enough. Suppose your banker may take your money to Las Vegas to place it – for his benefit and yours, if he wins – in jeopardy. Of course, his bank must fail, but the effect is far worse. If banks may do such things, there will be no banks, because no one will trust them. If people may come into your store and pinch your goods with impunity, it is not just that your store will go under. Nobody will put a store there to begin with.

Even hospitality depends on the distinction between what belongs to someone and what does not; and the virtue of hospitality is mutual, between the host and the guest. A man who never invites anyone into his house is not hospitable, but he does less harm to the virtue than does the squatter, who is in open defiance; his example makes a travesty of it. When I was a boy, we were given to know whose yards it was permitted for us to play in, and we observed the unwritten rules. One old man did not mind if we used the back of his property for baseball, so long as we did not climb up on his shed or hang around near his house. That was to be hospitable both ways.

When I was a paperboy, I knew I could cut several hundred yards off my route by taking a narrow passage between two houses, crossing a footbridge over a creek, and cutting through the backyard of one of the houses to which I delivered a paper. The owner permitted it. But I did not linger there, and I did not use the path unless I was on my route. That too was to be hospitable both ways.