Emerson certainly didn’t devise his treatise on friendship alone at his desk. The essay is also the echo of a series of profound personal experiences. Shortly before he wrote Friendship [1], his first wife had died, as had his mother and youngest brother. At the same time he got to know two friends whom he would not let go of for the rest of his life and who caused a great shock in his hitherto uniform emotional household. Margaret Fuller was the first American female journalist and feminist; she was the first to hit Emerson in his vulnerable spots and set him on fire. Twelve years his junior, highly gifted naturalist Henry David Thoreau, who even moved in almost immediately, questioned Emerson’s hierarchy of values almost daily. Emerson’s youngest brother gradually grew into an emblem post mortem, a role model of what was supposed to be a friend to Emerson. But we’re doing Emerson short by attributing his inspiration for “Friendship” only to family and friends. His rich and eventful life also provides many points of reference for the thoughts we find in “Friendship”.
Ralp Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was an extremely versatile American thinker, essayist, author and poet who throughout his life championed numerous social reforms. In this way he strongly opposed the laws that made slavery possible. He championed a powerful American self-consciousness in which there was no longer room for European influences:
Europe, an old faded garment of dead persons.
(From: Friendship )
and
We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe
His famous speech The American Scholar (1837) [2] , in which he passionately pleaded for more interiority, more individualism, more self-confidence and more naturalness in the most literal sense of the word, is regarded by many as America’s Second Declaration of Independence.
Religiously, Emerson called himself a transcendentalist. Transcendentalists were critical of their society’s “mindless conformity” and insisted that each person seek what Emerson called
an original relation with the universe.
In support of that search, Eastern spiritual texts were often consulted, but also the Corpus Hermeticum, from which Emerson regularly published fragments from 1840 in the magazine The Dial [3]. That was aimed at pushing the readers to a “higher level of consciousness” and to make them think differently.
Central to transcendentalism is the belief in the inherent goodness of both man and nature. Transcendentalists believed that society and its institutions, especially organized religion and political parties, corrupted the innocence of the individual. Man was at his best when he lived independently and self-sufficiently. An ideal community can only be composed of such individuals. Here the foundations were laid for what is now called deep ecology: a natural philosophy that strives for living in harmony with nature. Guiding thought is the union of thought, feeling, spirituality and action. Man should above all be aware of his role as a keeper rather than as a profiteer and destroyer of nature.
Emerson gave his great friend Thoreau the opportunity to experiment with this more than a century and a half ago. At the end of 1844, Emerson bought land at Walden Pond (Massachusetts) and Thoreau was able to build a cabin there and write his book Walden or Life in the Woods [4] in peace. Thoreau wanted to lead a
life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust
in the woods. He wanted to show that one could maintain an active relationship with nature that was not based on romantic considerations, defending a simple life as an alternative to modern society. The example of Emerson and Thoreau was followed in 1898 by the Dutch writer and psychiatrist Frederik van Eeden (author of, among others, “De kleine Johannes” [5] and “Jesus’ doctrine and hidden life” [6]), who lived with forty others on the Cruysbergen estate in Bussum. and founded the eponymous commune “Walden”. After nine years, the colony became defunct, but Van Eeden’s writer’s hut – modeled on Thoreau and Emerson – is still there.
The essay begins with a short poem in which the drop of blood contrasts with the upwelling sea. The poet elaborates on this contrast: the uncertain, ever-changing world opposite the beloved, which does appear to have stable roots. The poet thought that his friend would be gone, but in reality his kindness proved inexhaustible. The speaker’s heart is free again. Because of the virtue of this friendship, the sky seems vaulted and the rose is red again. Through the friend reality takes on a nobler form; the value of the friend is like a sun path. The friend has made the poet master of his despair. The wells of his hidden life are overflowing thanks to the friend. Emerson often begins an essay with a concise poem to announce in rich images the ideas he wants to discuss. The image of the world as a whole of water in which an individual is like a drop is reminiscent of Eastern philosophy in which the community of souls is sometimes presented as a kind of ocean.
A ruddy drop of manly blood
The surging sea outweighs,
The world uncertain comes and goes,
The lover rooted stays.
I fancied he was fled,
And, after many a year,
Glowed unexhausted kindliness
Like daily sunrise there.
My careful heart was free again, —
O friend, my bosom said,
Through thee alone the sky is arched,
Through thee the rose is red,
All things through thee take nobler form,
And look beyond the earth,
And is the mill-round of our fate
A sun-path in thy worth.
Me too thy nobleness has taught
To master my despair;
The fountains of my hidden life
Are through thy friendship fair.
We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken. Maugre all the selfishness that chills like east winds the world, the whole human family is bathed with an element of love like a fine ether. How many persons we meet in houses, whom we scarcely speak to, whom yet we honor, and who honor us! How many we see in the street, or sit with in church, whom, though silently, we warmly rejoice to be with! Read the language of these wandering eye-beams. The heart knoweth..
The effect of the indulgence of this human affection is a certain cordial exhilaration. In poetry, and in common speech, the emotions of benevolence and complacency which are felt towards others are likened to the material effects of fire; so swift, or much more swift, more active, more cheering, are these fine inward irradiations. From the highest degree of passionate love, to the lowest degree of good-will, they make the sweetness of life.
Our intellectual and active powers increase with our affection. [7] The scholar sits down to write, and all his years of meditation do not furnish him with one good thought or happy expression; but it is necessary to write a letter to a friend,–and, forthwith, troops of gentle thoughts invest themselves, on every hand, with chosen words. See, in any house where virtue and self-respect abide, the palpitation which the approach of a stranger causes. A commended stranger is expected and announced, and an uneasiness betwixt pleasure and pain invades all the hearts of a household. His arrival almost brings fear to the good hearts that would welcome him. The house is dusted, all things fly into their places, the old coat is exchanged for the new, and they must get up a dinner if they can. Of a commended stranger, only the good report is told by others, only the good and new is heard by us. He stands to us for humanity. He is what we wish. Having imagined and invested him, we ask how we should stand related in conversation and action with such a man, and are uneasy with fear.
The same idea exalts conversation with him. We talk better than we are wont. We have the nimblest fancy, a richer memory, and our dumb devil has taken leave for the time. For long hours we can continue a series of sincere, graceful, rich communications, drawn from the oldest, secretest experience, so that they who sit by, of our own kinsfolk and acquaintance, shall feel a lively surprise at our unusual powers. But as soon as the stranger begins to intrude his partialities, his definitions, his defects, into the conversation, it is all over. He has heard the first, the last and best he will ever hear from us. He is no stranger now. Vulgarity, ignorance, misapprehension are old acquaintances. Now, when he comes, he may get the order, the dress, and the dinner,–but the throbbing of the heart, and the communications of the soul, no more.
What is so pleasant as these jets of affection which make a young world for me again? What so delicious as a just and firm encounter of two, in a thought, in a feeling? How beautiful, on their approach to this beating heart, the steps and forms of the gifted and the true! The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed; there is no winter, and no night; all tragedies, all ennuis, vanish,–all duties even; nothing fills the proceeding eternity but the forms all radiant of beloved persons. Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the universe it should rejoin its friend, and it would be content and cheerful alone for a thousand years.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new. Shall I not call God the Beautiful, who daily showeth himself so to me in his gifts? I chide society, I embrace solitude, and yet I am not so ungrateful as not to see the wise, the lovely, and the noble-minded, as from time to time they pass my gate. Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine,–a possession for all time. Nor is nature so poor but she gives me this joy several times, and thus we weave social threads of our own, a new web of relations; and, as many thoughts in succession substantiate themselves, we shall by and by stand in a new world of our own creation, and no longer strangers and pilgrims in a traditionary globe. My friends have come to me unsought. The great God gave them to me. By oldest right, by the divine affinity of virtue with itself, I find them, or rather not I, but the Deity in me and in them derides and cancels the thick walls of individual character, relation, age, sex, circumstance, at which he usually connives, and now makes many one.
“It is not I who finds my friends, but the divine that lives in me as well as in them,” Emerson argues. We find this very strongly in the British monk and philosopher Aelred van Rievaulx (c. 1110-1167) [8]. In a well-thought-out argument about friendship (De spirituali amicitia) he comes to the conclusion that God is not only Love but that God is also Friendship, yes, without friendship man cannot survive for a moment because “a life without friendship is beastly.” Seeking God and growing in friendship run parallel for Aelred. At the beginning of his discourse, in a dialogue with a friend, he immediately touches on the core of his discourse on friendship, “the warm wisdom of the heart”: “Here we are, you and I, and I hope that a third, Christ , is in our midst.” Thus, in his view, a true friendship relationship with one or more others only exists with Christ as the binding force. Referring to the Gospel of John with the well-known phrase “God is Love”, Aelred goes one step further “God is Friendship” (Deus amicitia est). Aelred van Rievaulx immediately acknowledges that his thesis does not have the authority of the Bible “but I do not hesitate to apply to friendship what follows (in John) about love: He who abides in friendship abides in God, and God in him.”
High thanks I owe you, excellent lovers, who carry out the world for me to new and noble depths, and enlarge the meaning of all my thoughts. These are new poetry of the first Bard,–poetry without stop,–hymn, ode, and epic, poetry still flowing, Apollo and the Muses chanting still. Will these, too, separate themselves from me again, or some of them? I know not, but I fear it not; for my relation to them is so pure, that we hold by simple affinity, and the Genius of my life being thus social, the same affinity will exert its energy on whomsoever is as noble as these men and women, wherever I may be.”
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
I confess to an extreme tenderness of nature on this point. It is almost dangerous to me to “crush the sweet poison of misused wine” of the affections. A new person is to me a great event, and hinders me from sleep. I have often had fine fancies about persons which have given me delicious hours; but the joy ends in the day; it yields no fruit. Thought is not born of it; my action is very little modified. I must feel pride in my friend’s accomplishments as if they were mine,–and a property in his virtues. I feel as warmly when he is praised, as the lover when he hears applause of his engaged maiden. We over-estimate the conscience of our friend. His goodness seems better than our goodness, his nature finer, his temptations less. Every thing that is his,–his name, his form, his dress, books, and instruments,–fancy enhances. Our own thought sounds new and larger from his mouth.
Yet the systole and diastole of the heart are not without their analogy in the ebb and flow of love. Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed. The lover, beholding his maiden, half knows that she is not verily that which he worships; and in the golden hour of friendship, we are surprised with shades of suspicion and unbelief. We doubt that we bestow on our hero the virtues in which he shines, and afterwards worship the form to which we have ascribed this divine inhabitation.
(…)
I hear what you say of the admirable parts and tried temper of the party you praise, but I see well that for all his purple cloaks I shall not like him, unless he is at last a poor Greek like me. I cannot deny it, O friend, that the vast shadow of the Phenomenal includes thee also in its pied and painted immensity,–thee, also, compared with whom all else is shadow. Thou art not Being, as Truth is, as Justice is,–thou art not my soul, but a picture and effigy of that. Thou hast come to me lately, and already thou art seizing thy hat and cloak. Is it not that the soul puts forth friends as the tree puts forth leaves, and presently, by the germination of new buds, extrudes the old leaf? The law of nature is alternation for evermore. Each electrical state superinduces the opposite. The soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone for a season, that it may exalt its conversation or society. This method betrays itself along the whole history of our personal relations. The instinct of affection revives the hope of union with our mates, and the returning sense of insulation recalls us from the chase. Thus every man passes his life in the search after friendship, and if he should record his true sentiment, he might write a letter like this to each new candidate for his love:
DEAR FRIEND: —
If I was sure of thee, sure of thy capacity, sure to match my mood with thine, I should never think again of trifles in relation to thy comings and goings. I am not very wise; my moods are quite attainable; and I respect thy genius; it is to me as yet unfathomed; yet dare I not presume in thee a perfect intelligence of me, and so thou art to me a delicious torment.
Thine ever, or never.
Throughout the essay, Emerson is lavish with figures of speech. The so-called hypophora stand out, that is, asking rhetorical questions and then immediately answering. By answering the questions he poses, Emerson creates a purifying and emphasizing effect that immediately provides readers with solutions and ideas to ponder.
Using various paradoxes or oxymorons, such as “delightful torment,” “beautiful foe,” and “sweet poison,” Emerson consistently sums up the paradoxical nature of friendship. These expressions show the twofold sensation of pleasure and pain that can be experienced within friendship, as well as the importance of a sense of closeness and distance from another person. In Emerson’s letter to a hypothetical friend, he signs “forever yours or never yours.” Friendship, according to Emerson, is always a process of reciprocity or not—in other words, the feeling of being yours or not yours.
Yet these uneasy pleasures and fine pains are for curiosity, and not for life. They are not to be indulged. This is to weave cobweb, and not cloth. Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the tough fibre of the human heart. The laws of friendship are austere and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of morals. But we have aimed at a swift and petty benefit, to suck a sudden sweetness. We snatch at the slowest fruit in the whole garden of God, which many summers and many winters must ripen. We seek our friend not sacredly, but with an adulterate passion which would appropriate him to ourselves. In vain. We are armed all over with subtle antagonisms, which, as soon as we meet, begin to play, and translate all poetry into stale prose. Almost all people descend to meet. All association must be a compromise, and, what is worst, the very flower and aroma of the flower of each of the beautiful natures disappears as they approach each other. What a perpetual disappointment is actual society, even of the virtuous and gifted! After interviews have been compassed with long foresight, we must be tormented presently by baffled blows, by sudden, unseasonable apathies, by epilepsies of wit and of animal spirits, in the heyday of friendship and thought. Our faculties do not play us true, and both parties are relieved by solitude.
I ought to be equal to every relation. It makes no difference how many friends I have, and what content I can find in conversing with each, if there be one to whom I am not equal. If I have shrunk unequal from one contest, the joy I find in all the rest becomes mean and cowardly. I should hate myself, if then I made my other friends my asylum.
“The valiant warrior famoused for fight, After a hundred victories, once foiled, Is from the book of honor razed quite, And all the rest forgot for which he toiled.”
Shakespeare
Our impatience is thus sharply rebuked. Bashfulness and apathy are a tough husk, in which a delicate organization is protected from premature ripening. It would be lost if it knew itself before any of the best souls were yet ripe enough to know and own it. Respect the naturlangsamkeit which hardens the ruby in a million years, and works in duration, in which Alps and Andes come and go as rainbows. The good spirit of our life has no heaven which is the price of rashness. Love, which is the essence of God, is not for levity, but for the total worth of man. Let us not have this childish luxury in our regards, but the austerest worth; let us approach our friend with an audacious trust in the truth of his heart, in the breadth, impossible to be overturned, of his foundations.
The attractions of this subject are not to be resisted, and I leave, for the time, all account of subordinate social benefit, to speak of that select and sacred relation which is a kind of absolute, and which even leaves the language of love suspicious and common, so much is this purer, and nothing is so much divine.
I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frostwork, but the solidest thing we know. For now, after so many ages of experience, what do we know of nature, or of ourselves? Not one step has man taken toward the solution of the problem of his destiny. In one condemnation of folly stand the whole universe of men. But the sweet sincerity of joy and peace, which I draw from this alliance with my brother’s soul, is the nut itself, whereof all nature and all thought is but the husk and shell. Happy is the house that shelters a friend! It might well be built, like a festal bower or arch, to entertain him a single day. Happier, if he know the solemnity of that relation, and honor its law!
He who offers himself a candidate for that covenant comes up, like an Olympian, to the great games, where the first-born of the world are the competitors. He proposes himself for contests where Time, Want, Danger, are in the lists, and he alone is victor who has truth enough in his constitution to preserve the delicacy of his beauty from the wear and tear of all these. The gifts of fortune may be present or absent, but all the speed in that contest depends on intrinsic nobleness, and the contempt of trifles.
There are two elements that go to the composition of friendship, each so sovereign that I can detect no superiority in either, no reason why either should be first named.
- One is Truth. A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another. Sincerity is the luxury allowed, like diadems and authority, only to the highest rank, that being permitted to speak truth, as having none above it to court or conform unto. Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins. We parry and fend the approach of our fellow-man by compliments, by gossip, by amusements, by affairs. We cover up our thought from him under a hundred folds. I knew a man, who, under a certain religious frenzy, cast off this drapery, and, omitting all compliment and commonplace, spoke to the conscience of every person he encountered, and that with great insight and beauty. At first he was resisted, and all men agreed he was mad. But persisting, as indeed he could not help doing, for some time in this course, he attained to the advantage of bringing every man of his acquaintance into true relations with him. No man would think of speaking falsely with him, or of putting him off with any chat of markets or reading-rooms. But every man was constrained by so much sincerity to the like plaindealing, and what love of nature, what poetry, what symbol of truth he had, he did certainly show him. But to most of us society shows not its face and eye, but its side and its back. To stand in true relations with men in a false age is worth a fit of insanity, is it not? We can seldom go erect. Almost every man we meet requires some civility,–requires to be humored; he has some fame, some talent, some whim of religion or philanthropy in his head that is not to be questioned, and which spoils all conversation with him. But a friend is a sane man who exercises not my ingenuity, but me. My friend gives me entertainment without requiring any stipulation on my part. A friend, therefore, is a sort of paradox in nature. I who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my being, in all its height, variety, and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form; so that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.
- The other element of friendship is tenderness. We are holden to men by every sort of tie, by blood, by pride, by fear, by hope, by lucre, by lust, by hate, by admiration, by every circumstance and badge and trifle, but we can scarce believe that so much character can subsist in another as to draw us by love. Can another be so blessed, and we so pure, that we can offer him tenderness? When a man becomes dear to me, I have touched the goal of fortune. I find very little written directly to the heart of this matter in books. And yet I have one text which I cannot choose but remember. My author says [9] “I offer myself faintly and bluntly to those whose I effectually am, and tender myself least to him to whom I am the most devoted.” I wish that friendship should have feet, as well as eyes and eloquence. It must plant itself on the ground, before it vaults over the moon. I wish it to be a little of a citizen, before it is quite a cherub. We chide the citizen because he makes love a commodity. It is an exchange of gifts, of useful loans; it is good neighbourhood; it watches with the sick; it holds the pall at the funeral; and quite loses sight of the delicacies and nobility of the relation. But though we cannot find the god under this disguise of a sutler, yet, on the other hand, we cannot forgive the poet if he spins his thread too fine, and does not substantiate his romance by the municipal virtues of justice, punctuality, fidelity, and pity.
“Only he who blots out the uncleanness of my soul can ever be a friend.”
Jan Hus 1369-1415, pioneering Czech reformer and tireless truth-seeker.
“One by one I see and love those who have been given to me for natural support and for the attractiveness of my existence.”
Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), French evolution philosopher.
I hate the prostitution of the name of friendship to signify modish and worldly alliances. I much prefer the company of ploughboys and tin-peddlers, to the silken and perfumed amity which celebrates its days of encounter by a frivolous display, by rides in a curricle, and dinners at the best taverns. The end of friendship is a commerce the most strict and homely that can be joined; more strict than any of which we have experience. It is for aid and comfort through all the relations and passages of life and death. It is fit for serene days, and graceful gifts, and country rambles, but also for rough roads and hard fare, shipwreck, poverty, and persecution. It keeps company with the sallies of the wit and the trances of religion. We are to dignify to each other the daily needs and offices of man’s life, and embellish it by courage, wisdom, and unity. It should never fall into something usual and settled, but should be alert and inventive, and add rhyme and reason to what was drudgery.
Friendship may be said to require natures so rare and costly, each so well tempered and so happily adapted, and withal so circumstanced, (for even in that particular, a poet says, love demands that the parties be altogether paired,) that its satisfaction can very seldom be assured. It cannot subsist in its perfection, say some of those who are learned in this warm lore of the heart, betwixt more than two. I am not quite so strict in my terms, perhaps because I have never known so high a fellowship as others.
I please my imagination more with a circle of godlike men and women variously related to each other, and between whom subsists a lofty intelligence. But I find this law of one to one peremptory for conversation, which is the practice and consummation of friendship. Do not mix waters too much. The best mix as ill as good and bad. You shall have very useful and cheering discourse at several times with two several men, but let all three of you come together, and you shall not have one new and hearty word. Two may talk and one may hear, but three cannot take part in a conversation of the most sincere and searching sort. In good company there is never such discourse between two, across the table, as takes place when you leave them alone. In good company, the individuals merge their egotism into a social soul exactly co-extensive with the several consciousnesses there present. No partialities of friend to friend, no fondnesses of brother to sister, of wife to husband, are there pertinent, but quite otherwise. Only he may then speak who can sail on the common thought of the party, and not poorly limited to his own. Now this convention, which good sense demands, destroys the high freedom of great conversation, which requires an absolute running of two souls into one.
No two men but, being left alone with each other, enter into simpler relations. Yet it is affinity that determines which two shall converse. Unrelated men give little joy to each other; will never suspect the latent powers of each. We talk sometimes of a great talent for conversation, as if it were a permanent property in some individuals. Conversation is an evanescent relation,–no more. A man is reputed to have thought and eloquence; he cannot, for all that, say a word to his cousin or his uncle. They accuse his silence with as much reason as they would blame the insignificance of a dial in the shade. In the sun it will mark the hour. Among those who enjoy his thought, he will regain his tongue.
Friendship requires that rare mean betwixt likeness and unlikeness, that piques each with the presence of power and of consent in the other party. Let me be alone to the end of the world, rather than that my friend should overstep, by a word or a look, his real sympathy. I am equally balked by antagonism and by compliance. Let him not cease an instant to be himself. The only joy I have in his being mine, is that the not mine is mine. I hate, where I looked for a manly furtherance, or at least a manly resistance, to find a mush of concession. Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo. The condition which high friendship demands is ability to do without it. That high office requires great and sublime parts. There must be very two, before there can be very one. Let it be an alliance of two large, formidable natures, mutually beheld, mutually feared, before yet they recognize the deep identity which beneath these disparities unites them.
He only is fit for this society who is magnanimous; who is sure that greatness and goodness are always economy; who is not swift to intermeddle with his fortunes. Let him not intermeddle with this. Leave to the diamond its ages to grow, nor expect to accelerate the births of the eternal. Friendship demands a religious treatment. We talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected. Reverence is a great part of it. Treat your friend as a spectacle. Of course he has merits that are not yours, and that you cannot honor, if you must needs hold him close to your person. Stand aside; give those merits room; let them mount and expand. Are you the friend of your friend’s buttons, or of his thought? To a great heart he will still be a stranger in a thousand particulars, that he may come near in the holiest ground. Leave it to girls and boys to regard a friend as property, and to suck a short and all-confounding pleasure, instead of the noblest benefit.
Let us buy our entrance to this guild by a long probation. Why should we desecrate noble and beautiful souls by intruding on them? Why insist on rash personal relations with your friend? Why go to his house, or know his mother and brother and sisters? Why be visited by him at your own? Are these things material to our covenant?
Leave this touching and clawing. Let him be to me a spirit. A message, a thought, a sincerity, a glance from him, I want, but not news, nor pottage. I can get politics, and chat, and neighbourly conveniences from cheaper companions. Should not the society of my friend be to me poetic, pure, universal, and great as nature itself? Ought I to feel that our tie is profane in comparison with yonder bar of cloud that sleeps on the horizon, or that clump of waving grass that divides the brook? Let us not vilify, but raise it to that standard. That great, defying eye, that scornful beauty of his mien and action, do not pique yourself on reducing, but rather fortify and enhance. Worship his superiorities; wish him not less by a thought, but hoard and tell them all. Guard him as thy counterpart. Let him be to thee for ever a sort of beautiful enemy, untamable, devoutly revered, and not a trivial conveniency to be soon outgrown and cast aside. The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be seen, if the eye is too near. To my friend I write a letter, and from him I receive a letter. That seems to you a little. It suffices me. It is a spiritual gift worthy of him to give, and of me to receive. It profanes nobody. In these warm lines the heart will trust itself, as it will not to the tongue, and pour out the prophecy of a godlier existence than all the annals of heroism have yet made good.
Respect so far the holy laws of this fellowship as not to prejudice its perfect flower by your impatience for its opening. We must be our own before we can be another’s. There is at least this satisfaction in crime, according to the Latin proverb;–you can speak to your accomplice on even terms [Crimen quos inquinat, aequat]. To those whom we admire and love, at first we cannot. Yet the least defect of self-possession vitiates, in my judgment, the entire relation. There can never be deep peace between two spirits, never mutual respect, until, in their dialogue, each stands for the whole world.
What is so great as friendship, let us carry with what grandeur of spirit we can. Let us be silent,–so we may hear the whisper of the gods. Let us not interfere. Who set you to cast about what you should say to the select souls, or how to say any thing to such? No matter how ingenious, no matter how graceful and bland. There are innumerable degrees of folly and wisdom, and for you to say aught is to be frivolous. Wait, and thy heart shall speak. Wait until the necessary and everlasting overpowers you, until day and night avail themselves of your lips. The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one. You shall not come nearer a man by getting into his house. If unlike, his soul only flees the faster from you, and you shall never catch a true glance of his eye. We see the noble afar off, and they repel us; why should we intrude? Late,–very late,–we perceive that no arrangements, no introductions, no consuetudes or habits of society, would be of any avail to establish us in such relations with them as we desire,–but solely the uprise of nature in us to the same degree it is in them; then shall we meet as water with water; and if we should not meet them then, we shall not want them, for we are already they. In the last analysis, love is only the reflection of a man’s own worthiness from other men. Men have sometimes exchanged names with their friends, as if they would signify that in their friend each loved his own soul.
The higher the style we demand of friendship, of course the less easy to establish it with flesh and blood. We walk alone in the world. Friends, such as we desire, are dreams and fables. But a sublime hope cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other regions of the universal power, souls are now acting, enduring, and daring, which can love us, and which we can love. We may congratulate ourselves that the period of nonage, of follies, of blunders, and of shame, is passed in solitude, and when we are finished men, we shall grasp heroic hands in heroic hands. Only be admonished by what you already see, not to strike leagues of friendship with cheap persons, where no friendship can be. Our impatience betrays us into rash and foolish alliances which no God attends. By persisting in your path, though you forfeit the little you gain the great. You demonstrate yourself, so as to put yourself out of the reach of false relations, and you draw to you the first-born of the world,–those rare pilgrims whereof only one or two wander in nature at once, and before whom the vulgar great show as spectres and shadows merely.
It is foolish to be afraid of making our ties too spiritual, as if so we could lose any genuine love. Whatever correction of our popular views we make from insight, nature will be sure to bear us out in, and though it seem to rob us of some joy, will repay us with a greater. Let us feel, if we will, the absolute insulation of man. We are sure that we have all in us. We go to Europe, or we pursue persons, or we read books, in the instinctive faith that these will call it out and reveal us to ourselves. Beggars all. The persons are such as we; the Europe an old faded garment of dead persons; the books their ghosts. Let us drop this idolatry. Let us give over this mendicancy. Let us even bid our dearest friends farewell, and defy them, saying, ‘Who are you? Unhand me: I will be dependent no more.’ Ah! seest thou not, O brother, that thus we part only to meet again on a higher platform, and only be more each other’s, because we are more our own? A friend is Janus-faced: he looks to the past and the future. He is the child of all my foregoing hours, the prophet of those to come, and the harbinger of a greater friend.
I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them. We must have society on our own terms, and admit or exclude it on the slightest cause. I cannot afford to speak much with my friend. If he is great, he makes me so great that I cannot descend to converse. In the great days, presentiments hover before me in the firmament. I ought then to dedicate myself to them. I go in that I may seize them, I go out that I may seize them. I fear only that I may lose them receding into the sky in which now they are only a patch of brighter light. Then, though I prize my friends, I cannot afford to talk with them and study their visions, lest I lose my own. It would indeed give me a certain household joy to quit this lofty seeking, this spiritual astronomy, or search of stars, and come down to warm sympathies with you; but then I know well I shall mourn always the vanishing of my mighty gods. It is true, next week I shall have languid moods, when I can well afford to occupy myself with foreign objects; then I shall regret the lost literature of your mind, and wish you were by my side again. But if you come, perhaps you will fill my mind only with new visions, not with yourself but with your lustres, and I shall not be able any more than now to converse with you. So I will owe to my friends this evanescent intercourse. I will receive from them, not what they have, but what they are. They shall give me that which properly they cannot give, but which emanates from them. But they shall not hold me by any relations less subtile and pure. We will meet as though we met not, and part as though we parted not.
It has seemed to me lately more possible than I knew, to carry a friendship greatly, on one side, without due correspondence on the other. Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is not capacious?
The American writer and psychotherapist Lillian Rubin (1924-2014) [10] attracted worldwide attention with her book Just Friends, in which she especially examined these aspects of the “elusive” concept of friendship, which Emerson also experienced as contradictory. When Rubin started her book, her hometown launched a campaign touting the value of friendship for our physical and mental well-being. Make a friend was the slogan, a friend can save you a doctor. To her, this was proof that friendship is surrounded by a “haze of ambiguity.” On the one hand, friendship is essential for people from young to old, on the other it is still a “neglected form of relationship.” When she posed the question What is a friend to her research group? everyone came out with an idealized designation: trust, honesty, respect, involvement, security, support, open-mindedness, loyalty, reciprocity, steadfastness, understanding, tolerance. But when she asked how her respondents actually interacted with their friends, a significant discrepancy, also felt by Emerson, was revealed. As an example the question: do you have a bosom friend or best friend and if so, who is that? She then contacted all of the close friends mentioned. What did that show? In 64%, the originally interviewed by Rubin was not on the list of closest friends. Only in 14% did the mentioned bosom friend come out on top! But Emerson wonders if that’s regrettable. True friendship does not depend on petty feelings such as reciprocity but far transcends them: “Unrequited love is considered a shame. The great will see that true love cannot be unrequited. True love transcends unworthy goals. She lives and thinks in the eternal, and when the poor and temporary semblance falls away she does not grieve, but feels liberated from all that material and realizes her independence all the more firmly.”
It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the crude and cold companion. If he is unequal, he will presently pass away; but thou art enlarged by thy own shining, and, no longer a mate for frogs and worms, dost soar and burn with the gods of the empyrean. It is thought a disgrace to love unrequited. But the great will see that true love cannot be unrequited. True love transcends the unworthy object, and dwells and broods on the eternal, and when the poor interposed mask crumbles, it is not sad, but feels rid of so much earth, and feels its independency the surer. Yet these things may hardly be said without a sort of treachery to the relation. The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust. It must not surmise or provide for infirmity. It treats its object as a god, that it may deify both.
Sources:
[1] Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Friendship and other essays (Arcturus Publishing Limited London 2019)
[2] The American Scholar, 1837
[3]The Dial was an American magazine of literature, philosophy, and politics, published during the 19th and 20th centuries
[4] Thoreau, Henry David. Walden or Life in the Woods, 1854
[5] Eeden, Frederik van. De kleine Johannes [The little John], 1885
[6] Eeden, Frederik van. Jezus’ leer en verborgen leven [Jesus’ doctrine and hidden life],1919
[7] We also find a similar idea in Leonardo da Vinci. Only with Leonardo the accent is slightly different: “The more one knows, the more one loves.”
[8] Aelred van Rievaulx, Affectus – De spirituele kracht van vriendschap en liefde [Affectus – The spiritual power of friendship and love], translation and annotation S. Slijkhuis, G. Aerden en J. Banke (Damon Budel 2010)
[9] It is unclear who Emerson means here
[10] Rubin, Lillian B., Just Friends (Harper & Row New York 1985);
[11] McNulty, John Bard, “Emerson’s Friends and the Essay on Friendship.” New England Quarterly 19 (Sept 1946): 390-94
[12] Whicher, Stephen E., Freedom and Fate, an inner life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (University of Pensylvania Press Philadelphia 1957)
[13] Schulte Nordholt, J., Een dichter in de politiek [A poet in politics], (Van Loghum Slaterus Arnhem 1966)
[14] Rucker, Mary E. “Emerson’s ‘Friendship’ as Process.” ESQ 18 (4 Quarter 1962): 234-48
[15] Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Zeven Essays [Seven essays] (eds. J. Havelaar en N. Havelaar Mees) (Wereldbibliotheek Amsterdam) [1914]
[16] Versluis, A., American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions (Oxford University Press – Oxford 1993)
[17] The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson, eds. Joel Porte and Saundra Morris (Cambridge University Press Cambridge 1999)
[18] Yarbrough, Stephen R. “From the Vice of Intimacy to the Vice of Habit: The Theories of Friendship of Emerson and Thoreau.” Thoreau Journal Quarterly, 8 (July-Oct 1981): 63-73
[19] Baldwin, David. “The Emerson-Ward Friendship: Ideals and Realities.” In Studies in the American Renaissance 1984
[20] Sebouhian, George. “A Dialogue with Death: An Examination of Emerson’s ‘Friendship’.” Studies in the American Renaissance, 1289 (Charlottesville: UP of VA 1989) 219-239
[21] Newfield, Christopher J. “Loving Bondage: Emerson’s Ideal Relationships.” ATQ 5 (1991): 183-93
[22] Derkse, W. Over Vriendschap [About friendship] (Lannoo Tielt 2010)[25]
