Real charm is dynamic, an enveloping spell which mysteriously enslaves the senses. It is an inner light, fed on reservoirs of benevolence which well up like a thermal spring. It is unconscious, often nothing but the wish to please, and cannot be turned on and off at will.
42. You recognize charm by the feeling you get in its presence. You know who has it. But can you get it, too? Probably, you can't, because it's a quickness of spirit, an originality of touch you have to be born with. Or it's something that grows naturally out of another quality, like the simple desire to make people happy. Certainly, charm is not a question of learning tricks, like wrinkling your nose, or having a laugh in your voice, or gaily tossing your hair out of your dancing eyes. 43. Such signs, to the nervous, are ominous warnings which may well send him streaking for cover. On the other hand, there is an antenna, a built-in awareness of others, which most people have, and which care can nourish.
But in a study of charm, what else does one look for? Apart from the ability to listen-rarest of all human virtues and most difficult to sustain without vagueness--apart from warmth, sensitivity, and the power to please, what else is there visible? 44. A generosity, I suppose, which makes no demands, a transaction which strikes no bargains which doesn't hold itself back till youv'e filled up a test-card making it clear that you're worth the trouble. Charm can't withhold, but spends itself willingly on young and old alike, on the poor, the ugly, the dim, the boring, on the last fat man in the corner. 45. It reveals also in a sense of ease, in casual but perfect manners, and often in a physical grace which springs less from an accident of youth than from a confident serenity of mind. Any person with this is more than just a popular fellow, he is also a social healer.
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"Humanism" has used to mean too many things to be a very satisfactory term. 57. Nevertheless, and in the lack of a better word, 58. I shall use it here to explain for the complex of attitudes which this discussion has undertaken to defend.
59. In this sense a humanist is anyone who rejects the attempt to describe or account of man wholly on the basis of physics, chemistry, and animal behavior. 60. He is anyone who believes that will, reason, and purpose are real and significant: that value and justice, are aspects of a reality called good and evil and rests upon some foundation other than custom; 61. that consciousness is so far from a mere epiphenomenon that it is the most tremendous of actualities; 62. that the unmeasured may be significant; or, to sum it all up, 63. that those human realities which sometimes seem to exist only in human mind are the perceptions of the mind.
64. He is, in other words, anyone who says that there are more things in heaven and earth than those dreamed of in the positivist philosophy.
65. Originally, to the sure, the term humanist meant simply anyone who thought the study of ancient literature his chief concern. Obviously it means, as I use it, very much more. 66. But there remains nevertheless a certain connection between the aboriginal meaning and that I am attempting to give it. 67. Because those whom I describe as humanists usually recognize that literature and the arts have been pretty consistently "on its side" and 68. because it is often to literature that they turn to renew their faith in the whole class of truths which the modem world has so consistently tended to dismiss as the mere figments of a wishful thinking imagination.
69. Insofar as this modern world gives less and less attention to its literary past, insofar as it dismisses that as something outgrow and 70. to be discarded as much as the imperfect technology contemporary with it has been discarded, 71. just to that extent it facilitate the surrender of humanism to technology. 72. The literature is to be found, directly expressed or, 73. more often, indirectly implied the most effective correction to the views now most prevalent among the thinking and unthinking.
74. The great imaginative writers present a picture of human nature and of human life which carries conviction and thus giving the lie to all attempts to reduce man to a mechanism. Novels and poems, and dramas are so persistently concerned with the values which relativism rejects that one might even define literature as the attempt to pass value judgments upon representations of human life. 75. More often than not those of its imaginative persons who fail to achieve power and wealth are more successful than those who do not--by standards which the imaginative writer persuades us to accept as valid.
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