ABSTRACT
Only when we give first are we free, and this is the reason why, in the first gift, which is not occasioned by any gratitude, there lies a beauty, a spontaneous devotion to the other, an opening up and flowering from the “virgin soil” of the soul, as it were, which cannot be matched by any subsequent gift, no matter how superior its content. The difference involved here finds expression in the feeling (apparently often unjustified in regard to the concrete content of the gift) that we cannot return a gift; for it has a freedom which the return gift, because it is that, cannot possibly possess. 1
