Reciprocity hangs, like a sword of Damocles, over every human head. He's only asking me to his party so I'll give his book a good review. They've been to din ner twice and never asked us back once. After all I did for him, how could he do that to me? If you do this for me, I promise I'll make it up later. What did I do to deserve that? You owe it to me. Obligation; debt; favour; bargain; contract; exchange; deal.... Our language and our lives are permeated with ideas of reciprocity. 4⁹ (Blank Slate)
It has, I believe, been given to only one literary text to express all the principal con stants of conflict in the condition of man. These constants are fivefold: the con frontation of men and of women; of age and of youth; of society and of the individual; of the living and the dead; of men and of god(s). The conflicts which come of these five orders of confrontation are not negotiable. Men and women, old and young, the individual and the community or state, the quick and the dead, mortals and immortals, define themselves in the conflictual process of defining each other. 6. . . Because Greek myths encode certain primary biological and social confronta tions and self-perceptions in the history of man, they endure as an animate legacy in collective memory and recognition. 87+Blank Slate)