The face you will not see again

Tell me about a stranger who changed something for you. What did they do, and why did it stick?

The question is almost embarrassing to answer honestly, because the answer is usually small. A nod on a bad morning. A bus driver who waited. A woman at a counter who saw you were about to cry and pretended she hadn't. The encounters that lodge in us are rarely the dramatic ones. They are the ones in which someone, for no reason and at no profit to themselves, treated us as though we mattered, and then walked out of our lives forever.

This chapter has no contributors yet. So it leans on what the old books say about the people we meet once — the orphan at the door, the traveler in the ditch, the man cursing us in the street, the friend sitting silent on the ground. The traditions disagree about much, but they converge, strangely, on this: a great deal of what a life amounts to is decided in encounters with people whose names we never learn.

The door left open

Begin with the simplest claim, which is also the hardest: that the stranger in need has a claim on you. Not a sentimental claim. A claim.

"Let thy house be wide open, and let the poor be members of thy household," ^[1] says one of the earliest rabbinic instructions, and the phrasing is worth pausing on — not guests in your household, members. The Qur'an puts it as prohibition: "As to the orphan therefore wrong him not; And as to him that asketh of thee, chide him not away." ^[2] And again, more sharply, against those who pray with one hand and refuse the needy with the other: "Woe to those who pray, But in their prayer are careless; Who make a shew of devotion, But refuse help to the needy." ^[3] The Epistle of James makes it the whole of religion: "Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction." ^[4]

Proverbs anticipates the easy excuse — I'll help next week, when things settle — and forecloses it: "Say not unto thy neighbour, Go, and come again, and to morrow I will give; when thou hast it by thee." ^[5] Ecclesiastes goes further and frames giving as a kind of wager against an unknown future: "Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days. Give a portion to seven, and also to eight; for thou knowest not what evil shall be upon the earth." ^[6] You do not know who will need you, or when you will need them. So give.

Pirkei Avot, with its sly taxonomies, sorts the givers into four types: one who gives but resents others giving, one who urges others to give but withholds himself, one who gives and is glad when others give too, and one who neither gives nor wants anyone else to. ^[7] The categories sting because they describe people we recognize, sometimes in the mirror. The point is not that generosity is good — everyone says that — but that the quality of the giving, the eye behind it, is itself being weighed.

The wounded man on the road

The image that has done more than any other to fix the idea of the stranger in the Western imagination is a Samaritan on a road, kneeling beside a man he doesn't know. "But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him, and went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him." ^[8] The parable's whole force lies in the question Jesus puts afterward: "Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves? And he said, He that shewed mercy on him. Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise." ^[9]

The trick of the parable is that neighbour is redefined as a verb. You do not have neighbours by geography; you become one, briefly, by stopping. The Samaritan is a stranger to the wounded man and remains a stranger. He pays the innkeeper and rides on. They will not meet again.

The Buddhist texts make the same point in their drier register, listing the acts that move one nearer the gods: "Speak the truth, do not yield to anger; give, if thou art asked for little; by these three steps thou wilt go near the gods." ^[10] Give, if thou art asked for little. The smallness is the whole instruction. And another verse: "He who always greets and constantly reveres the aged, four things will increase to him, viz. life, beauty, happiness, power." ^[11] Greet. Just greet.

When the stranger is difficult

But not every stranger arrives as a wounded man in need of oil and wine. Some arrive cursing. Some lie, mock, take advantage, do harm. The traditions are unsentimental about this — they assume it as a basic fact about the world. The question is what to do with it.

Marcus Aurelius is severe: "it is a mad man's part, to look that there should be no wicked men in the world, because it is impossible. Now for a man to brook well enough, that there should be wicked men in the world, but not to endure that any should transgress against himself, is against all equity, and indeed tyrannical." ^[12] The Stoic counsel is not to be unmoved by injury but to refuse the second injury, the one we add ourselves. "It is reported unto thee, that such a one speaketh ill of thee. Well; that he speaketh ill of thee, so much is reported. But that thou art hurt thereby, is not reported: that is the addition of opinion, which thou must exclude." ^[13]

The famous image is the fountain: "'They kill me, they cut my flesh; they persecute my person with curses.' What then? May not thy mind for all this continue pure, prudent, temperate, just? As a fountain of sweet and clear water, though she be cursed by some stander by, yet do her springs nevertheless still run as sweet and clear as before; yea though either dirt or dung be thrown in, yet is it no sooner thrown, than dispersed, and she cleared." ^[14] Marcus also asks why we expect different: "To them that are sick of the jaundice, honey seems bitter; and to them that are bitten by a mad dog, the water terrible... And why then should I be angry?" ^[15] The rude stranger is, in this picture, already suffering from a kind of sickness. Anger at him is anger at the symptom.

The Qur'an reaches for something more active: "Turn aside evil with that which is better." ^[16] And the Dhammapada gives perhaps the briefest portrait of the ideal: "Him I call indeed a Brahmana who is tolerant with the intolerant, mild with fault-finders, and free from passion among the passionate." ^[17] None of these is the same as forgiveness, exactly. They are postures one adopts toward the inevitable difficulty of other people — postures that protect something in oneself while leaving the other person room to be wrong.

Reading them before trusting them

And yet — the traditions are not naïve. To open one's door to the stranger is not to mistake every stranger for the wounded traveler. The same scriptures that command welcome also command discernment.

"Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits," ^[18] Matthew warns. The First Letter of John: "Believe not every spirit, but try the spirits." ^[19] Confucius confesses a slow education in human nature: "At first, my way with men was to hear their words, and give them credit for their conduct. Now my way is to hear their words, and look at their conduct." ^[20] He distinguishes three friendships that help — with the upright, the sincere, the observant — from three that injure: with "the man of specious airs; friendship with the insinuatingly soft; and friendship with the glib-tongued." ^[21] And he warns against deferring to crowds in either direction: "When the multitude hate a man, it is necessary to examine into the case. When the multitude like a man, it is necessary to examine into the case." ^[22]

The Dhammapada offers an image that cuts both ways: "Good people shine from afar, like the snowy mountains; bad people are not seen, like arrows shot by night." ^[23] The good are visible at distance. The harmful are not. So look for the snowy mountain, and watch the dark. And elsewhere: "The scent of flowers does not travel against the wind... but the odour of good people travels even against the wind; a good man pervades every place." ^[24] If a stranger's goodness has a kind of scent, then perhaps part of what we sense, in the encounters that linger, is exactly this — the unforced quality of someone good, recognized before we could explain it.

There is a tension here that the traditions do not resolve. Open the door wide; and try the spirits. Welcome the orphan; and watch the conduct. Both are true. The work is in holding both at once.

Courtesy that travels

Beneath welcome and beneath discernment lies something simpler still: the basic register in which we address the people we pass. Confucius said that if a man's "words be sincere and truthful, and his actions honourable and careful;-- such conduct may be practised among the rude tribes of the South or the North." ^[25] Sincerity travels. It crosses languages.

Pirkei Avot's instruction is to "speak little, but do much; and receive all men with a pleasant countenance." ^[26] The Bhagavad Gita asks for something nearly impossible: "Being of equal grace to comrades, friends, Chance-comers, strangers, lovers, enemies, Aliens and kinsmen; loving all alike, Evil or good." ^[27] The Tao Te Ching gives a quieter version: "We should blunt our sharp points, and unravel the complications of things; we should attemper our brightness, and bring ourselves into agreement with the obscurity of others." ^[28] Soften your edges. Match the dim light of the room you're in.

The Dhammapada gives, for my taste, the most beautiful instruction on how to move through any community of strangers at all: "As the bee collects nectar and departs without injuring the flower, or its colour or scent, so let a sage dwell in his village." ^[29] Take what you need. Leave the flower intact.

And finally, the rule that nearly every tradition states in its own dialect — Confucius: "What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others"; ^[30] Matthew: "all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets." ^[31] The strangeness of the rule is that it is the simplest possible piece of moral instruction and yet is sufficient, by itself, to organize a life.

The grace of saying nothing

There is one more thing the traditions know about strangers, and it is the hardest to teach: when to keep quiet.

Marcus Aurelius learned from his grammar teacher "to be un-reprovable myself, and not reproachfully to reprehend any man for a barbarism, or a solecism, or any false pronunciation, but dextrously by way of answer... taking no notice of the word." ^[32] You correct without correcting. You let the other person save face.

Confucius: "When a man may be spoken with, not to speak to him is to err in reference to the man. When a man may not be spoken with, to speak to him is to err in reference to our words. The wise err neither in regard to their man nor to their words." ^[33] Half of all kindness is timing.

Pirkei Avot is more concrete: "Do not try to appease your friend during his hour of anger; Nor comfort him at the hour while his dead still lies before him; Nor question him at the hour of his vow; Nor strive to see him in the hour of his disgrace." ^[34] Not now. Not yet. And the picture of Job's three friends, before they begin to argue — "So they sat down with him upon the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spake a word unto him: for they saw that his grief was very great." ^[35] Seven days of silence. It was, the book hints, the best thing they did for him.

The stranger who changes something for us often does this. They say nothing, or almost nothing. They notice. They wait. They give us the small dignity of not being instructed when we are already on the floor.

Questions for the reader

• Think of a stranger who changed something for you. Was it what they did, or what they refrained from doing?
• Pirkei Avot sorts givers by the eye behind the gift. What is the eye behind yours?
• Whose door, today, are you keeping closed because tomorrow seems more convenient?