Dear Paul,
I have been thinking about friendships, how they arise, why they last—some of them—so long, longer than the passional attachments of which they are sometimes (wrongly) considered to be pale imitations. I was about to write a letter to you about all of this, starting with the observation that, considering how important friendships are in social life, and how much they mean to us, particularly during childhood, it is surprising how little has been written on the subject.
But then I asked myself whether this was really true. So before I sat down to write I went off to the library to do a quick check. And, lo and behold, I could not have been more wrong. The library catalog listed whole books on the subject, scores of books, many of them quite recent. But when I took a step further and actually had a look at these books, I recovered my self-respect somewhat. I had been right, or half-right, after all: what the books had to say about friendship was of little interest, most of it. Friendship, it would seem, remains a bit of a riddle: we know it is important, but as to why people become friends and remain friends we can only guess.
(What do I mean when I say that what is written is of little interest? Compare friendship with love. There are hundreds of interesting things to say about love. For instance: Men fall in love with women who remind them of their mothers, or rather, who both remind them and don’t remind them of their mothers, who are and are not their mothers at the same time. True? Maybe, maybe not. Interesting? Definitely. Now turn to friendship. Whom do men choose as friends? Other men of roughly the same age, with similar interests, say the books. True? Maybe. Interesting? Definitely not.)
Let me list the few observations on friendship, culled from my visits to the library, that I found of actual interest.
Item. One cannot be friends with an inanimate object, says Aristotle (Ethics, chapter 8). Of course not! Who ever said one could? But interesting nevertheless: all of a sudden one sees where modern linguistic philosophy got its inspiration. Two thousand four hundred years ago Aristotle was demonstrating that what looked like philosophical postulates could be no more than rules of grammar. In the sentence “I am friends with X,” he says, X has to be an animate noun.
Item. One can have friends without wanting to see them, says Charles Lamb. True; and interesting too—another way in which amical feelings are unlike erotic attachments.
Item. Friends, or at least male friends in the West, don’t talk about how they feel toward each other. Compare the garrulity of lovers. Thus far, not very interesting. Yet when the friend dies, what outpourings of grief: “Alas, too late!” (Montaigne on La Boétie, Milton on Edward King). (Question: Is love garrulous because desire is by nature ambivalent—Shakespeare, Sonnets—while friendship is taciturn because it is straightforward, without ambivalence?)