"The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits." G.K. Chesterton

Thursday, June 25, 2009

The disillusioned role of friendship

The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that a true friend is but a refuge. A healing, illusory sanctuary from ourselves or from the rest of the world, when either of them becomes unbearable.
That's why true friends need to be kept in an existential quarantine, away from all that they are meant to heal - ready to offer their idealised self on cue, whenever we need it. Also this is why the elimination of this necessary isolation ruins friendships or gives them the grotesque intermittent form.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

"The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that a true friend is but a refuge."

True Friend is not 'but a refuge'. Friend is refuge. There is nothing more to friendship it is the 'safe place' that we all should have. The refuge is of course reciprocal (give/take).

"A healing, illusory sanctuary from ourselves or from the rest of the world, when either of them becomes unbearable."

"Sanctuary from ourselves…" – this sounds very egotistic. One should not claim that one does not need the other - where the ideal other is the true friend unless one is (and can prove it) THE center of the universe.

"That's why true friends need to be kept in an existential quarantine, away from all that they are meant to heal - ready to offer their idealised self on cue, whenever we need it."

It is just but one, restricted view and the use of the term: "existential quarantine" makes the above sentence a paradox. If one thinks that one does not need a true friend than all the above does not make any sense. Not needing a friend is equal to not having one. If one has 'true' friend just for the sake of keeping him/her in a quarantine there is something cruel or even pathological about it.

"Also this is why the elimination of this necessary isolation ruins friendships or gives them the grotesque intermittent form."

Here is the cardinal mistake: True friendship is a connection, much deeper than anything imaginable (non erotic) between two people. And such a connection is never intermittent. Intermittent is only the refuge – it is taken/given when needed. You missed the one crucial element of friendship: give and take – not just give or just take.

Just give or just take is outright dishonest and should never be called a friendship.

Zegarnek

Mariusz Popieluch said...

Reading your responses carefully, I can conclude only this much: I may as well have written this in a language foreign to you

In other words, your comments contain no evidence of you having grasped the main point in this short bit of prose.

Anonymous said...

That is a correct conclusion. We both are talking in foreign languages.

Z