Generosity is often associated with material value, wealth or riches. It refers to giving away a material thing of value that is external to us, a thing that we ourselves had been given or had acquired, an article of clothing, a parcel of food, a precious stone. At the origin of this kind of generosity is the act of an other, of someone else who showed us some sort of generosity. It’s an exchange whereby we were given the thing, or perhaps purchased the thing in exchange for something of value.
In this sense an act of generosity is a kind of story, a narrative, a chronology or a history, a chain of events. It’s the story of a thing that becomes possessed, then dispossessed. It’s a relation to things that come and go in a kind of cycle, things that we might, in another world, another life, have lived without, and with which we live now briefly or for a long period.
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