Friendship

Unnecessary?

Photo by James Baldwin on Unsplash

“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.” (C. S. Lewis) Perhaps you’ve read this.  I hadn’t and wanted to share.

Apart from my failure to understand “necessity,” except as a term in logic, I do agree wholeheartedly with Lewis.  As I visit with alumni, I have seen the wonderful arc of friendships that were made at Heidelberg and have survived the years.

Do all of you, I wonder, appreciate how remarkable this is?  Sociologists call places that celebrate friendships, like “Cheers,” third places.  As “escapes” from family and work they are alternative worlds, but “third?”  Certainly not third to work, at least not work as we have degraded it.  Actually, don’t the best families often self-describe as friendships?

What is this alchemy? 

The wisest thing we can say about any of us is that our physical separateness from all else is an illusion.  We are social to the core.  Our friends are more part of our ourselves, our real identity, than our arms and legs, truly appendages. 

I think this is what Lincoln meant when he said we can strain but not break “the mystic bonds.”  As merely the myths, memes and comforts of history they are easily breakable, but as what makes us a “people,” they are what we share, they are part of us.  And that is what may save this country.   

But the saving of one State among many, in whatever form, is not the true gift of this mystery.  Friendship is central to our survival, because it is beyond our power to negate.  No “personal” act of self-pity or self-hate can separate us from our friends, from what is our true selves. 

Actually, it is far different from and way beyond whatever proud fiction we claim as “necessary” for our survival.