Philanthropy Recollected

H. Peter Karoff is known as the man who invented or popularized the phrase, "strategic philanthropy." Now, in his writings on "The Moral Dimension of Philanthropy in  a Time of Scarcity" he suggests, "Philanthropy is an end in itself." So, Auden once wrote, chastising himself for his activist days,  "Poetry makes nothing happen." The scarcity that Peter means is money, of course, but moral imagination is pretty scarce too.  Originality befalls a person who listens to the muse, the Daughter of Memory, and is faithful to a tradition. Not legacy but recollection, as Wordsworth said poetry is. The loneliest of voices, half heard half overheard, stills the passersbye, and recalls them to community, or commemoration. This is legacy as in patrimony.