Tidying up my bookshelves this morning, as one does when one has an assignment due, I stumbled across a book, Wise Women by Susan Cahill, which I flipped open randomly.
Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991) wrote:
As far as the education of children is concerned I think they should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones.
Not thrift but generosity and an indifference to money; not caution but courage and a contempt for danger; not shrewdness but frankness and a love of truth; not act but love for one’s neighbour and self-denial; not a dire for success but a desire to be and to know.
The little virtues arise from our deepest instincts, from a defensive instinct; but in them reason speaks, holds forth, displays its arguments as the brilliant advocate of self-preservation.
The great virtues well up from an instinct in which reason does not speak, an instinct that seems to be difficult to name.
What are your great virtues? What wells up, with no need for reason or logic within you and within our community?
Which virtues appear for you in times of another’s great need when there is no time to think?
And when they well up what happens? How do they find expression in your life?
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