Friendship Part 4

I like to consider friendship in fiction for a better understanding of humanity. This may seem trite, but it is how we make sense of the world. I have always subscribed to the fact that nonfiction may be true, but fiction is the truth. I have met people over the years who claim to hate fiction. Of course anyone who has said that to me, it's the last conversation we have. How could someone possibly say to me that they hate fiction when they find out that that was what I did, what I wrote? It's truth that we find in fiction. A work of fiction is somehow attached to something very real, very universal. In these stories we meet characters who are moving along their own trajectory and finding the truth for themselves.

When I consider the portrayal of friends in fiction there are the predictable books that come to mind. Those books we all grew up with. Books like John Knowles A Separate Peace which was on my reading list in high school. The entire story is really about two young prep school boys shortly before or right at the start of the second world war. Another example would be Ishmael and Queequeg in Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Of course, the greatest friends that I can ever imaged would have to between Huck Finn and Jim in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. There's hundreds more. Thousands.

Friendship Part 3

In this complex world of human endeavors, I know the way in which we build friendships are every bit as complex. We have shared experiences, we have the opportunity to discuss different experiences. Along with everything else, Aristotle defined friendship. To him there were three types of friendship: of utility, of pleasure and of the good. Being in the business of writing everything down, of course Aristotle would have the inclination to define friendship. In his day, speech and philosophy were the same disciple. And the discussion of what it took to be a good friend was part of the conversation.

The idea that there is a friendship of utility means that you have a friend who is useful to you in some way. I think this is a very common friendship when we consider the people we work with, or the people we see in school. These are certainly friends, and the common plane is the workplace. In all the years I worked restaurants, I always felt like I had a built-in circle of friends, the people I talked with during work hours and the people that I sat shoulder to shoulder with in drinking establishments that the normal people just would visit.

Friendship Part 2

Sometimes I become very disappointed by the way it has all turned out. In a crowded dinning room recently, I noticed first the low volume then I realized why. There were people in groups of twos and threes at individual tables. It seemed like nearly everybody was engaged with their personal device. Nobody spoke, at least not to the heartbeat with whom they shared a table.

This is not a new conundrum. It's been slowly invading our public places for years. I remember the rowdy coffeehouses of my youth where everyone seemed hopped up on caffeine and nicotine and we spoke about all those things you'd imagine to hear. There was fierce political thought. There was anecdotes, there were card games. There was always this allure of love or at least sex. In those days, at the danger of sounding like a sentimental old man, we made fun of the one guy in the corner looking into a computer screen. We made fun of the guy looking into the computer screen and looking into a screen is what I am doing now. In the halcyon days before technology made us instantly connected and instantly compartmentalized, we made fun of anyone who wasn't doing what we were doing: drinking coffee and talking loudly about nothing and everything.

Friendship

Imagine this: we're all in a darkened room, a large room like a sports arena. Everyone gets issued a box. This particular box is like the box you made for grade school valentine's day cards. And then we're set free into this large darkened room. We're tasked with collecting friends. We will collect friends like small valentine's day cards and put them in the box. The first one who has their box overflowed with friends wins the game.

I wonder if this is the way we collect friends, or if this is the perception of the collecting friends. In this way, we take a two dimensional representation of a friends and file it into a box simply called “friend.” In 1842 Russian writer and satirist Nikolai Gogol's book Lost Souls set about describing upper middle class Russian life as defining wealth with the number of serfs one owned. Of course, with the more serfs someone owned, the more taxes that person paid. Gogol's main character Chichikov set about the countryside to buy the souls of dead serfs which he got at a good price. Those who sold him dead souls were free from the taxes they'd otherwise have to pay. And Chichikov? Well, on paper he seemed very rich. We may not collect lost souls, but we do collect friends & followers. I don't see how this is any different from Chichikov collecting souls of dead serfs in order to seem more wealthy or powerful.