On Friendship

This is a topic that surely has been dealt with in far more depth and beauty than I am able to command but I try to blog about what I find myself thinking of. Friendship has been at the fore of my mind all week. I'm not entirely certain why, but so it is, and so this is.

What is it about our amicable connections to each other that are so desperately important? one has a sense that this attachment of likemindedness that is made between two unique and individual souls is somehow vital. Perhaps it is the quiet joy of finding a piece of yourself in another that grants our friendships their importance. This spark, so often unexpectedly discovered, in another soul is almost like a homecoming in an unexpected place. It is like finding childhood pictures of yourself hung lovingly on the wall of a home in a foreign country. It has the beauty of being both a remembrance and a hope. As such, there is an implicit and mutual attraction and awareness that here is another person who understands, in a very intimate but Platonic way, who I am. And what is especially remarkable is the realization that what this means is that somebody else sees a piece of themselves within you. There is almost a magnetic kind of attraction between kindred spirits that is felt from both ends. Bacon writes in his essays,

"But little do men perceive what solitude is and how far it extendeth; for a crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love. The Latin adage meeteth with it a little, A great city is a great solitude (magnus civitas, magna solitudo); because in a great town friends are scattered, so that there is not that fellowship, for the most part, which is in less neighborhoods: but we may go further, and affirm most truly, that it is a mere and miserable solitude to want true friends, without which the world is but a wilderness; and even in this sense of solitude, whosoever in the frame of his nature and affections is unfit for friendship, he taketh it of the beasts, and not from humanity." (Essays, pg 109-110)

Friendship is a human inclination and it is a natural one. As Cicero notes in De Amicitia, friendships are not formed to create advantages for oneself (though this may occur after the fact) but rather they develop naturally, sometimes in spite of disadvantages that may ensue on the part of one party or the other. Virtue pursues virtue. Kindred hearts recognize one another.

That is a lovely thought. Friendship seems to be, in a sense, like a pre-loaded tripwire or some genetic predisposition or a Manchurian candidate-just unknowingly waiting to meet that other person that turns it "on". It's a natural recognition of the one in another. I think this is why friendship can have a duel sensibility to it. On the one hand, it is as if you've known this person all your life even though you may have just met. On the other hand, when you see a friend you may have not seen in decades, it is as if nothing has happened. The old camaraderie is instantaneous, remembered glowingly and it is as if not a day went by since you last met. Your friend is like a memory of yourself called forth and standing there in front of you. There is a mysterious circularity of time that is easier to feel than it is to describe. As TS Eliot writes as the first lines in his magisterial Four Quartets,

"Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past."

This sentiment is felt at once when both meeting a new friend and running into an old one. Our friends from the past may seem to fade away due to the hard circumstances, challenges and vicissitudes of our lives pulling us away from each other but in an odd sense they are still with us. Perhaps, even more strangely, they were with us before we met them as well. And maybe in that present moment, when a new friend is discovered (and I say discovered but perhaps I should say remembered) and an old friend is remembered (though perhaps I should say re-discovered), it is human affection and a recognition of ourselves within another that is the tie that melts our linear sense of time away. As Eliot later writes,

"Love is most nearly itself

When here and now cease to matter."

A friend leaves an indelible impression upon your soul as "the wax takes the sign from the ring without the iron and gold" (Aristotle, De Anima). But I am left wondering if perhaps it was always there to begin with.

I have had the great benefit of reconnecting with old friends and finding new ones through the writing of The Meteorite. I want to thank anyone reading this for their support on my somewhat quixotic pursuit of writing. Your kind reviews on Amazon and Goodreads and your support for my modest efforts warm the heart. As always, I'd love to hear from you at authorandrewross@gmail.com and I hope all my friends, new and old and future and past, are happy and well.