Is friendship for life?
Last week, on a flying visit to London, I wrote to a friend about meeting up. It had been a while since we’d communicated, perhaps three years, which was the longest we’d been out of touch. We’d both moved jobs and continents, and the disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic hadn’t helped. So, I sent him an impromptu email telling him I was in town and in a postscript added that it was a shame we’d drifted apart.
Unfortunately, he was traveling for work, so we had to postpone. “Let’s not over complicate a reunion drink,” he added sensibly. Friendship has “an ebb and flow, sometimes moving apart but always returning.” Yes, of course, I replied. See you again soonish.
But this brief exchange, which was another deferment of an often-adjourned catchup, made me wonder if friendship really is a tidal phenomenon, rising and falling under the influence of some gravitational force. Can friendship boomerang through lost time, as my friend suggested, in a recurrent homecoming arc? Or is it just, far more banally, that the ardor of most friendships peters out as a matter of course, crashing (to paraphrase the poet Mayakovsky) like a love boat on philistine reefs? Perhaps all those lifelong friendships we read about in history are exceptions or an unattainable ideal, like that of Cicero and Titus Pomponius (aka Atticus), the inspiration for Cicero’s magnificent essay ‘How to be a friend.’
In the three-year interlude of our non-communication—the “ebb” in my friend’s words—momentous events had taken place in both our lives (in my case the death of a father and an elder brother), about which we were oblivious. Wasn’t that great chunk of unshared experience an impediment to the intimacy required of any meaningful friendship? Isn’t friendship another way of speaking about communication? The philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon certainly thought so. Friendship, he observed, is a means of self-knowledge, enabling a person to open her mind to another, freeing her from “Griefs, Joys, Fears, Hopes, Suspicions, Counsels, and whatsoever lieth upon the Heart to oppress it.” Persons without friends, he famously quipped, are “Cannibals of their own Hearts,” feeding upon their emotions since they have no other outlet for expression.
Likewise, Montaigne insisted that friendship was different from kinship and marriage because it existed outside of rigid institutional obligations; it was sustained only by the emotional and intellectual affinities that connect two persons.
“My friends are my estate,” the poet Emily Dickinson wrote in a letter to Samuel Bowles, the newspaper editor and family friend with whom she corresponded. Like her poetry, it’s a complex distillation and comes in a shortish letter that moves between observations about love, God, and nature—nothing less, you might say, than the meaning of life.
The equation of “friends” with an “estate” is hardly straightforward. Does Dickinson mean that friends should be carefully tended, like plants in a garden, rather than taken for granted? Perhaps, but the word “estate” from the French état (“state”) and ultimately from the Latin verb “to stand,” has many other connotations, ranging from a person’s possessions or property (including the assets and liabilities left at death) to a social or political class.
Are our friends our assets, reflections of our self-worth and social standing? Is Dickinson suggesting that our friendships are our legacy? Or that friends bring out the good in us, as Dickinson’s friendship with Bowles inspired her poetic reflections in the letter? And perhaps the letter-writing is key; the effort required to pen those reflections is what creates friendship. Is there something inimical to friendship in the age of the instant-message-tweetup, where inboxes get overfed with junk, while mailboxes line the street like empty bird-boxes in a silent spring?
Back in New York, I resumed work on my new book. But the theme of friendship seemed to crop up everywhere I looked. Even in an old French text by Jean de Coras, a judge from Toulouse who’d participated in the trial of Arnaud du Tilh, executed in 1560 for impersonating another man called Martin Guerre.
The story of Martin Guerre has been told many times and popularized in numerous books, a musical, and movies, including a 1982 film directed by Daniel Vigne with Gérard Depardieu and Nathalie Baye. Eight years after leaving his home, a man who looks identical to Guerre arrives back in his native village to reclaim his patrimony (perhaps “estate” is the Dickinsonian word I should be using, here?) and is accepted by Guerre’s wife, relatives, and many of the villagers, as the missing man. However, several years later, rumors circulate that the real Guerre is in fact still alive and the alleged “imposter” is put on trial. As the trial proceeds, the “real” Guerre returns, and his fraudulent lookalike, who is outed as Arnaud du Tilh, is executed. (Montaigne, who may have witnessed the execution in Toulouse, claimed that the verdict was unfair, since there wasn’t enough evidence to convict him.)
As I reread it, the story seemed to raise issues about identity and authenticity central to the question of friendship. Are we all imposters claiming to be our former selves, like the born-again “Martin Guerre” who professed to be a long-lost husband and father. Is he, or isn’t he? We want the real Martin Guerre to please stand up but perhaps he can’t because after a decade of absence there is no real Martin Guerre, there is only an impersonator of a former self. Someone trying to live up to who he thinks his former self might have been. As the philosopher Heraclitus put it, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”
My Zen Buddhist cousin in Santa Fe would call it an illusion, or possibly a delusion. Just another craving for some phantasmic object, a vain hunger for fulfillment. What self can we go back to when we’re in perpetual flux. Hasn’t the Swedish stem-cell biologist Jonas Frisén and his team at the Karolinska Institute worked out that there can never in fact be a going back because on average the cells in our bodies replace themselves every 7 to 10 years? Eons before that in his Life of Theseus, didn’t Plutarch ask whether Theseus’s ship, which had been preserved so assiduously by the Athenians, really was the same ship given that over time every plank had been replaced? We’re never who we were.
And if life is constant change and we aren’t who we used to be, how can friendship be constant? What kind of seismic-resistant psychological architecture can survive the stress and strain of those inevitable shifts propelled by life?
But perhaps the answer is that a friendship doesn’t end when two people cease to be friends. It has an afterlife beyond the diminishing bonds of worldly relations. Was that, in the end, what Dickinson meant by “estate”? Her friends were friends because they had helped to prepare the ground from which the poems sprang. And that gift was enough—more than enough.