On Friendship

The book’s main appeal is the opportunity it provides to follow along as someone grapples with an ephemeral part of human experience. Doing so has come to feel more and more poignant as I have made my slow progress. At times, it seems as though Derrida is describing a bygone way of being, one racked with less anxiety about the bonds that tie us together. In an era of social media and fluid, proliferating channels of communication and exchange, the idea of friendship seems almost quaint, and possibly imperiled. In the face of abundant, tenuous connections, the instinct to sort people according to a more rigid logic than that of mere friendship seems greater than ever.

It is ultimately a book about social bonds, and our capacity to envision a collective future that surpasses the dire possibilities of the present. “For to love friendship,” Derrida writes, “it is not enough to know how to bear the other in mourning; one must love the future.”

Perhaps friendship could offer a model for politics, or a vision of what politics could become. As friends, we volunteer for one another, we choose to keep each other’s secrets. Perhaps friendship is what makes politics possible in the first place, for how else would we understand what it means to call someone an enemy? “The possibility, the meaning and the phenomenon of friendship would never appear unless the figure of the enemy had already called them up in advance, had indeed put to them the question or the objection of the friend, a wounding question, a question of wound,” Derrida writes. “No friend without the possibility of wound.” As with all seemingly natural binaries, one half contains the seed of the other, and the capacity to self-destruct.

The poet David Whyte said that "the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self. The ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone, and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them, and to have believed in them, and sometimes, just to have accompanied them, for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.”

Nobody has the friends you have. Very few people live on your particular street or go to your particular coffee shop or bike along the same path as you. Nobody has your dog, your backyard, your weird toys or odd books. As it turns out, the most enduring form of originality is happening at the extremely local level. And this truth is changing the landscape of originality in photography. So, while drone images, travel photography, urban photography and celebrity portraits all feel cliché at this point, the individuality of one’s own private world of thoughts, values and passions are as fresh as ever.

pink

“Slowness means cleaving perfectly to time, so closely that the seconds fall one by one, drop by drop like the steady dripping of a tap on stone. This stretching of time deepens space. It is one of the secrets of walking: a slow approach to landscapes that gradually renders them familiar. Like the regular encounters that deepen friendship.” —Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

“Kindred spirits are not so scarce as I used to think. It’s splendid to find out there are so many of them in the world.” —L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“She recognized that that is how friendships begin: one person reveals a moment of strangeness, and the other person decides just to listen and not exploit it.” —Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

“We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.” —Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Many friends know who you are, but only the real ones know why

“Not a word passes between us, not because we have nothing to say, but because we don’t have to say anything.” —Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“‘You have been my friend,’ replied Charlotte. ‘That in itself is a tremendous thing.’” —E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web

“I knew when I met you an adventure was going to happen.” —A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other. For, if it lies in the nature of indifference and of the crowd to recognize no solitude, then love and friendship are there for the purpose of continually providing the opportunity for solitude. And only those are the true sharings which rhythmically interrupt periods of deep isolation.

Rainer Maria Rilke

The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light.


— James Baldwin, Nothing Personal

"Aristotle taught that knowledge of self could be found through knowledge of the other. We understand what it means to be noble and honest because we see and admire these qualities in our friends. We recognize that our own actions are vile only when we see someone else doing the same. One of his followers put it this way: "So as when we want to see our own face, we see it by looking in a mirror, similarly when we wish to know ourselves, we can do so by looking at a friend, for a friend, as we say, is another self." — Meghan O’Gieblyn⁠

Find people who dare to speak against you. Allow them to prick at the things that make you uneasy. Let them challenge your character whenever they will it. Listen to the truths they tell regardless of how hard they are to absorb. Do not mistake their realism for an insult, and do the least to consider their opinions than to dismiss them. These are your friends, who readily break you to strengthen you when you fail to do it yourself.

“What do we do when our hearts hurt?" asked the boy.

"We wrap them with friendship, shared tears and time, till they wake hopeful and happy again.”

**Charlie Mackesy ·  The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse**

As a practical matter, friendship is voluntary and vague, a relationship that easily slides into the background of life. For some, friendship is enduring and rhythmic; for others, it’s a sporadic intimacy of resuming conversations that were left years prior. There are people we only talk to about serious things, others who only make sense to us in the merriment of drunken nights. Some friends seem to complete us; others complicate us.

“Solid self-esteem in adulthood is hard earned. It comes from tapping into our own creativity and personal pleasures, from developing our competence and our connections, from participating in friendship, intimacy, and community. It develops from living in accord with our deeply held values and priorities, from learning to recognize and share both competence and vulnerability, and from navigating relationships with integrity, balance, and generosity of spirit. Living well is the work of a lifetime that demands our full attention.” — Harriet Lerner in Fear and Other Uninvited Guests: Tackling the Anxiety, Fear, and Shame That Keeps Us from Optimal Living and Loving, p. 70.

Derrida insists that the narrative of friendship requires us to constantly imagine how we may someday pay our friends eulogistic tribute.

In these shorter pieces, Derrida shows how engaging with the ideas of others could be one of the ultimate expressions of friendship. He struggles with what it means to truly pay homage to another; the genre of eulogy always focusses attention back on the survivor and his grief.