If you’re going to hand your cash to an unfortunate stranger, do it with positivity, not grudgingly, says James Parker in this ode from his latest book

“Ode to Giving People Money”

It’s a primal scene, a biblical scene: the have meets the have-not. In the subway, on the street, at the traffic light, along the underpass, anywhere in America. Abundance—as in an experiment in moral physics—is confronted by lack. What happens next?

You, patently, have. A bed, a shower, a fridge, a place to go, a buffer or two against intolerable pressure. The person in front of you, patently, has not. A glance suffices to tell you that. And they’re asking you for money. Do you give it? Should you? Must you? Do you want to?

We can dispense immediately with the traditional canard: they’ll only spend it on drugs. Fuck—if I may—that. What a pernicious mingling of Ayn Randian superiority and liberal pseudo-concern. As Jerry says to George in an episode of Seinfeld: “Are you even vaguely familiar with the concept of giving?” Maybe they will spend it on drugs. Or maybe they’ll spend it on a new copy of William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, to replace the one that was lost when their campsite of two years was deconstructed—in their absence—by park rangers. The point is, you don’t know. And if you’ve truly given, it’s none of your business.

Let’s get back to the encounter itself. Awkward, isn’t it? The society of which you have just been correctly identified as a member, the system of which you are a functioning part, has thrown the person before you into a transparent condition of penury and exile. What sets you up has broken them down. What swallows you has spat them out. Perhaps you feel a flickering of shame. And then a flickering of annoyance at the flickering of shame. Jesus Christ, their hands are out and their tin cups are rattling—why can’t they leave you alone? Affluence is no picnic: you have a prescription to refill, a phone to upgrade, a car to get repaired, a spouse to argue with. This endless suck of ambient need— it’s too much.

Here’s my tip: if you’re temperamentally indisposed, keep your money. A penny given a poor man “grudgingly,” wrote the magnificent nutter Leon Bloy, “pierces the poor man’s hand, falls, pierces the earth, bores holes in suns, crosses the firmament and compromises the universe.” So don’t do that.

But if you are inclined to give, then give wholeheartedly. Not for charity, not for responsibility, not even for the person in front of you, but for the act itself. Existence is a gift, right? You don’t have to like it, but it’s a gift. A cosmic freebie. And when you give, unconditionally, you’re participating in the same divine economy that big-banged you—you— into being. Let it circulate through you unobstructed. Through your glands and through your veins. The person before you needs money, and you need to give it. Unplug the springs of life, and hand it over.

This is an extract from Get Me Through the Next Five Minutes: Odes to Being Alive by James Parker (WW Norton, £19.99). Buy a copy from bookshop.org here.

Or buy a copy from Blackwell’s here.

James Parker is our guest on “A Drink with the Idler” this week. Join us as he talks to Tom Hodgkinson about America, punk rock, being an agony uncle and of course his Odes to Being Alive: Thursday 16 October at 6-7pm. Book here – it’s free for subscribers.

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