Ingratitude

Use in the book

The central fault is not limitless desire but the strange inability to value a received good. Once a desired object becomes familiar, its possession itself becomes a reason to despise it. This process can never be satisfied by increasing the stock of possessions, because it destroys every satisfaction upon arrival.

Traherne extends the diagnosis from personal restlessness to a whole culture of invented wealth. People abandon solid gifts for fashionable substitutes and then blame their deprivation. Ingratitude is thus a disorder of perception with ethical and theological consequences: it makes an abundant world effectively absent and refuses the giver within the gift. Its correction requires present esteem, not merely thanks after a temporary rescue.

Places to read

1. I.21Insatiableness is distinguished from the ingratitude that despises every acquired good.
2. I.31Failure to perceive the world’s beauty is treated as blindness and ingratitude.
3. I.32Benefits themselves become the occasion of contempt and the pursuit of invented treasures.

In this edition

The explicit approval of insatiableness in I.21 prevents reading ingratitude as a synonym for ambition or a desire that exceeds present possessions.