On Friendship

And why had he never had a friend, as Jorge O’Kelly had been for Prado--A friend with whom he could have talked about things like loyalty and love, and about death? Pascal Mercier Night Train to Lisbon

I’ve had only a few friends in my life. I did have a friend in junior high school, but we were too young then to talk about love and death. I had another friend in high school who I enjoyed talking with at lunch. But all we ever talked about were the classes we were taking and I never saw him again after we graduated

In college I didn’t really have any close friends, even though you started to hear talk of love and death then. In graduate school I did have a close friend and we must have talked a lot about love and death, as we spent one summer reading Durrell’s Alexandrian Quartet.

He was about the closest friend I ever had. We snuck away from classes once in a while to go to the horse races. One year we staged a Kentucky Derby Party, mint juleps, fancy hats, and a genuine betting table. It was one of those all-time-best-ever parties.

He and his wife became our bridge friends and we often had dinner together at home or in the City. But we lost contact after graduate school and then one day I learned he had taken his life. He felt thoroughly out of place in psychology and was fighting chaos that I never heard much about.

After that, there have been no close friends in my life. Never again did we play bridge or have regular dinner companions. The closest person in my life has always been my wife and we talk almost daily about love and death. But I’ve never considered her a friend, as she is something in a higher realm altogether.

Like Gregorious in Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon, lately I’ve begun to wonder why I’ve never really had any close friends, at least for any length of time. Gregorious never answers that question, never even tries. And for me it also remains a puzzle.

In The Spinoza Problem Irvin Yalom writes of Spinoza, Ah, friendship! So this is the glue that holds people together—this warmth, this loneliness-dispelling state of mind. Doubting so much, fearing so much, revealing so little, he had sampled friendship far too rarely in his life.

Later, Spinoza replies, Though I desire and insist upon a solitary life to pursue my meditations, I can sense another part of me longing for intimacy.

For those of us of this disposition, we often turn to books for our friends. We are under no delusions about them, but for a while we become true companions, often far less troublesome than our real friends. Anthony Burgess wrote, “I am convinced that many novel-readers go to a book not merely for the story but for the companionship of the teller of the story—they want a friend with a somewhat greater knowledge of the world than themselves, one who knows the clubs, a good cigar, Tangier and Singapore, who has perhaps dallied with strange women and read odd books, but remains friendly, smiling, tolerant but indignant when the reader would be indignant, always approachable and always without side.”

I find my fictional friends generally far more perceptive with richer bank of ideas than those I encounter off the page. But while I talk with them, they rarely reply or if they do, it is with a voice that leaves open the question of what they might have said if they could jump off the page and land on the empty chair beside me.

In Three Dollars Elliot Perlman wrote: If you have ever loved your parents, if you have ever been able to talk with them, then all you really want from life is someone you can talk to when your parents die.

Isn’t what that what a friend is for, someone who you can talk to, who listens to what you say, and to whom you might say things you’d never tell anyone else? It would be even better if a response were made. But is that really necessary? Perhaps someone who is simply there, a silent companion is all that matters.

On Facebook

And why had he never had a friend as Jorge O’Kelly had been for Prado--A friend with whom he could have talked about things like loyalty and love, and about death?
Pascal Mercier Night Train to Lisbon

I don’t understand Facebook or Twitter or really texting either. It’s not that I’m opposed to them. Rather, I simply don’t get their appeal. Of course, many explanations have been proposed and I’ve not found anything too objectionable in these accounts. But what I don’t understand is the purpose, the goal, the raison d’etre of communicating this way.

It is said that their goal is connection, to connect with one friends make new ones, find out what’s going on with them. What a strange way to make contact with another person, sometimes hundreds of persons, many of whom you’ve never met or spoken with, or have the slightest idea who they are.

In her essay Generation Why? in the New York Review of Books (November 2010) Zadie Smith also asks,

Why? Why Facebook? Why this format? Why do it like that? Why not do it another way? The striking thing about the real Zuckerberg, in video and in print, is the relative banality of his ideas concerning the “Why” of Facebook. He uses the word “connect” as believers use the word “Jesus,” as if it were sacred in and of itself: “So the idea is really that, um, the site helps everyone connect with people and share information with the people they want to stay connected with….”

Doesn’t anyone wonder about the nature of that connection, its quality, durability, the degree to which it is a genuine connection? Currently there are said to be over 750 million active users, half of whom log on to Facebook on any given day. The average user is said to have 130 friends, although a “friend” of mine has over 850 friends, and two members of my family have well over 800. What does it mean to have over 800 friends anyway? Is this some kind of a contest to see how many friends we can accumulate?

How can anyone have that many friends? Why are we not discussing the value of this kind of friendship?

I pose these questions not because I was raised during the letter-writing era, followed by the telephone and now e-mailing or that I’m simply an old grouch. I find some of these new communication techniques and the Internet itself a bit of a miracle.

Do Facebook members think much about the quality their connections? As far as I can tell the exchanges that occur on its website seem silly, rather superficial and scarcely the stuff of what we mean, or used to mean, by a friendship.

“Yes.” “Haha, that’s very funny.” “What a beautiful couple.” “Great photos.” “We're hard core: waited 2 hrs for screen door brunch. After a super grueling aerial class this morning I was so hungry! But the summer veggie hash was so worth the wait!” “New Job, new puppy, new car, new desk, new computer, new year since birth--same old guy.” There are an enormous number of Likes and X is now friends with Y and lots of Yeses.

Isn’t this slightly ridiculous?

In response I suppose devoted Facebookers could always quote Charles Lamb who in a letter to Coleridge wrote about his how he felt about his long suffering sister: “’Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and to have her nonsense respected.”

Eventually Smith closed her account at Facebook and writes: “The last defense of every Facebook addict is: but it helps me keep in contact with people who are far away! Well, e-mail and Skype do that, too,… If we really wanted to write to these faraway people, or see them, we would. What we actually want to do is the bare minimum, just like any nineteen-year-old college boy who’d rather be doing something else, or nothing.”

On Friendship

Sandor Marai’s Embers, first published in 1942 in Hungary, was widely praised when it was rediscovered a few years ago and given what I believe is an excellent English translation. It is a dark and somber novel, not at all light and fluffy like Eat, Pray, Love. The story involves a lavish dinner meeting that stretches s into the morning hours between a former Austrian general, Henrik, and his boyhood friend, Konrad, an impoverished relative of Chopin whose real talent is music:

Konrad’s music…didn’t offer forgetfulness; it aroused people to feelings of passion and guilt, and demanded that people be truer to themselves in heart and mind.

Early on you led to believe the novel is about the nature of friendship and the bond that develops between Henrik and Konrad:

The intimacy that bound them was closer that any physical bond.

It would be good to know whether such a thing as friendship actually exists….Sometimes I almost believe it is the most powerful bond in life and consequently the rarest. What is its basis? Sympathy? A hollow, empty word, too weak to express the idea that in the worst times two people will stand up for each other.,…The eros of friendship has no need of the body.

We are also led to believe there is also the friendship between the two men and Krisztina, Henrik’s beautiful and also musically inclined wife:

…her body seemed possess of a secret, as if her bones, her flesh, her blood concealed with them some essence, the secret of time or of life itself, a secret that could neither be told nor translated into any language, since is was beyond words.

…Krisztina whom I found the way a collector finds the prize of his life, the rarest, most perfect object in his collection, the masterpiece, the goal and the meaning of his existence.

But no, the novel is not about the nature of friendship, rather it is about the fundamental animosity between the two men, the end of their friendship and the way that occurred. This is revealed when they meet once again at the general’s castle after not having seen each other for 41 years. What happened to them during this interval? Why did Konrad abruptly leave Hungry for the tropics? And what is the purpose of their dinner rendezvous after all those years?

The protracted answer to these questions reads more like a judicial sentence than a cordial dinner conversation. We learn that their friendship was one in name only and that they were irrevocably separated by both class and belief. Although Konrad joined the military, he did so without conviction. Henrik says:

You set aside your uniform because you saw it as a disguise, that much is already clear. I, on the other hand, wore mine for as long as duty and the world demanded it.

We learn that one day on a hunt Henrik senses that Konrad is about to shoot him. And then Konrad suddenly resigns from the army and flees the country. When Henrik learns this, he rushes over to Konrad’s house to try to find out why only to discover that his “incandescent” wife, Krisztina, is there and that they had been lovers for years. They never speak to one another again throughout the remaining 8 years of her life as Henrik moves to a hunting lodge on his estate where he lives in solitude.

And so what we learn as Henrik’s long and repetitious lecture-sentence-peroration-tirade continues through the night is that his wife and friend had betrayed him. There is no dialogue, Konrad offers no defense or explanation; he hardly utters a word during the whole of Henrik’s catharsis. One grows weary reading it. Still, after all the hate and venom are let loose upon his guest, Henrik concludes: “You killed something side me, you ruined my life,” yet in the same breath, he proclaims “but we are still friends.”

I have written a less than enthusiastic review of Embers. I would not have read the book had a friend not sent it to me. But she said I might like it. Now after reading it, I’m not quite sure why. But we all read differently and no book speaks the same way to each reader. Perhaps you might enjoy it; one can never be sure of these things, let alone much of anything these days.

I close with passages from Embers on two themes that loom large in my current thinking—aging and change

On Aging
We age slowly. First, our pleasure in life and other people declines…we understand the significance of everything, everything repeats itself in a kind of troubling boredom. It’s the function of our…Then our bodies age, not all at once. First, it is the eyes, or the legs, or the heart. We age by installments. And then suddenly our spirits begin to age: the body may have grown old, but our souls still year and remember and search and celebrate and long for joy. And when the longing for joy disappears, all that are left are memories or vanity and then, finally, we are truly old.

…there’s nothing we want anymore, either good or bad. That is old age. There’s still some spark inside us, a memory, a goal, someone we would like to see again, something we would like to say or learn, and we know the time will come, but then suddenly it is no longer as important to learn the truth and answer to it as we had assumed in all the decades of waiting.

On Change
…neither reason nor experience can do much to change one’s stubborn nature.

…one cannot change another’s tastes or inclinations or rhythms, that essential otherness, no matter how close or how important the bond.

I am thinking that people find truth and collect experiences in vain, for they cannot change their fundamental natures.

…there’s no reward and we have to endure our characters and our natures as best we can, because no amount of experience or insight is going to rectify our deficiencies our self-regard, or our cupidity.