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Michelangelo's early works, like those of most artists of his time, went unsigned. No one installed little plaques by the niches they occupied in churches or palaces to identify the sculptor, though people who knew art knew his. It wasn't until he heard someone attribute the Roman Pietà to a rival that he entered St. Peter's in the dead of night and chiseled his name on the stone at the Virgin's feet to claim the credit due.
Intellectual property law has come a long way since then, and we threaten students with explusion and worse for failure to attribute authorship properly. Every year major research universities spend a portion of their budgets settling disputes about stolen credit for ideas, inventions, or discoveries to which a price tag has been attached. Now and then the Arts and Leisure section of a major newspaper reveals another artistic "hoax" or a case of misattributed authorship. The race to identify the structure of DNA and the much bitterer race to claim credit for discovery of the AIDS virus are now famous in the besmirched annals of scientific history.
But the most prolific presence in the history of human endeavor, the one who still gets the prize for the most varied and surprising range of creativity, is old "Anonymous." "Anon," we call him or her affectionately in bibliographies. Anon has produced some of the loveliest moments in the history of the arts: sonnets and statues, illuminated parchments and luminous chants. One of Giotto's nameless apprentices painted a little fresco in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua that exudes a sweetness and truth equal to any of the grander pieces surrounding it: a figure of charity, one hand extended upward, and other downward, where her gaze falls kindly on a kneeling supplicant at her feet. She gave what she received, and was able to do the one because she could do the other. In St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna, an almost comic Virgin Mary, carved by some artisan who went home to several children and a potato dinner at night, gathers a crowd of assorted folk under her cape, looking benevolent but a tad bewildered at the bumptious lot she's undertaken to embrace. I want to meet the stonemason who made her at some heavenly festival of the arts; he'll still be chuckling.
In her autobiography Annie Dillard writes about a curious childhood habit of hiding pennies where strangers would find them and returning to the hiding places hours or days later to see if someone had been along to receive the surprise. Oddly, she did not wait and watch to catch the look of surprise and gratification on the face of the unknown beneficiary of her anonymous magnanimity. Imagining it seems to have been enough. It was enough to be a dispenser of grace—to commit, as we put it now, "random acts of kindness" and never be known for them.
By great good fortune I happened to be among the folks who contributed to the little volume called Random Acts of Kindness published by Conari Press in 1993. The writing of that volume came about in a highly unusual and creative way. The editors gathered a large group of friends and acquaintances at the publishing house, provided food, drink, computer terminals, tape recorders, pens, paper, and listeners, and a general atmosphere of celebration, and asked us to tell stories of random acts of kindness to them or to each other, or to write them down. When have people who had no reason to single you out and no expectation of reward been kind to you? When have you done that for someone else? The stories they gathered that night are simple, surprising, unsentimental testimonies to the forces of grace and generosity, still undefeated by capitalism, competition, and "enlightened self-interest." The acts described were more often than not anonymous. "I never got her name." "I never saw him again," people recalled with a certain touched amazement, as though finally it was the indifference to recognition or reward that made the act of kindness something not simply humane, but sacred. Anonymous gifts leave no doubt about the motive. They reaffirm the criteria Paul offered as tests of real love: that it "vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, … seeketh not her own."
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