The Fundamentals of Style: Generosity

[alden]

When a harsh, judgmental or snobbish person enters, do you feel the room constrict, oxygen becoming rarer, the space becoming darker?

When the generous, abundant and Stylish soul enters the room, do you feel it expand, your lungs filling with air, the space illuminated?

Style is light. It awakens us. Its beaming makes all seem possible.



Style is generous. It unifies and congregates. We are drawn toward it.

Be generous with your time, your self, your eyes, listen, greet, and create an illuminated space around you. For generosity to be magnetic it must be indiscriminate, it is not a tool of seduction, it is a state of being. You will feel the magnetism grow and develop as you begin to embody Style.

Cheers

Michael Alden

[uppercase]

Excellent!

Yes, I agree with this view.

Pettiness, jealously, being snide, judgemental and superior, I find abhorrent.

When a harsh, judgmental or snobbish person enters, do you feel the room constrict, oxygen becoming rarer, the space becoming darker?

When the generous, abundant and Stylish soul enters the room, do you feel it expand, your lungs filling with air, the space illuminated?

Style is light. It awakens us. Its beaming makes all seem possible.



Style is generous. It unifies and congregates. We are drawn toward it.

Be generous with your time, your self, your eyes, listen, greet, and create an illuminated space around you. For generosity to be magnetic it must be indiscriminate, it is not a tool of seduction, it is a state of being. You will feel the magnetism grow and develop as you begin to embody Style.

Cheers

Michael Alden

[Gruto]

Style is grace too, or is it possible have Style without having grace?

Style creates a pathos of distance, it stresses a difference between the man of Style and the other, or does Style embrace the other?

[alden]

Style is grace too, or is it possible have Style without having grace?

In the “Treatise on the Elegant Life”, Balzac described three degrees of grace that can be found in elegant men. (I will translate and post these passages.) He would answer that Style is not possible without grace and the stronger the influence of grace, the stronger the intensity of Style.

Style creates a pathos of distance, it stresses a difference between the man of Style and the other, or does Style embrace the other?

Style embraces. It is not discriminating. We recognize a kind of ideal in its glow and in ourselves someplace. That is part of the attraction, we see ourselves, what we could be if we could learn to accept fully who we are.

Cheers

Michael Alden

[Costi]

What balm to my soul these words are...
Excellent observation, Gruto - style is not supercilious, it is obliging and indulgent of others' foibles.
But if Style is not possible without Grace, the latter - alas! - is possible without Style... isn't it?

[marcelo]

The word “generosity” shares with “gentleman” the same origin. The French “générosité” was used earlier to refer, indeed, to “nobility” in the first place. The word may have change its sense, but as suggested in this thread we still admire generosity as a noble virtue. I remember I once quoted this passage from Cottingham in an essay on Descartes:

“The English transliteration ‘generosity’ is almost unavoidable, and is not entirely misleading (it would have been perfectly natural, even in the seventeenth-century French, to apply the term générosité to acts which we should nowadays calls acts of generosity); but for Descartes the term had powerful resonances which are largely absent in our modern usage. As a fluent Latinist, Descartes was of course acutely aware of the connotations of the cognate Latin adjective generosus, of which the primary sense is ‘noble’ or ‘well born’ (being derived from Latin noun genus, whose basic meaning is ‘race’ or ‘family’). By a simple shift, generosus then came to mean ‘noble-minded’ or ‘magnanimous’ (and was used by some Latin writers to indicate the possession of Aristotle’s overarching virtue of ‘greatsouledness’).”