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Philoxenia: love of strangers; eagerness to show hospitality; hospitality raises the idea of reciprocal duties of hospitality. Guest-host or host-guest.

I am entranced by this notion of host-guest. Reading about John Woolman this morning there is a related idea of putting oneself in the place of the stranger, for example the slave or the seaman in steerage, doing this imaginatively and through conversation with these strangers. Woolman does this through reading of scriptures, putting himself in the place of the exiles and the prophets and the masters. He is in conversation with the exiles and prophets and master, imaginatively. He is in verbal face to face conversation with the slaves and the seamen, as well as imaginatively. So imagination is part of, and a form of, conversation.

Juxtaposing these two, the host-guest and the imaginative conversing, what comes? The host has to put him or herself imaginatively and through converse into the feeling-sense of the other. Woolman’s term is “near sympathy.” Sympathy is a community of feeling. German Einfühlung, one feeling. The guest as well has been host and can imaginatively put on the apron and prepare the meal. And the guest can act as welcomer to the host, returning grace and story to the host. Host-guest is interwoven.

So then does conversation partake closely of the guest-host relation? Is host-guest an essential facet? Is imagination an essential facet?

:- Doug.