My word for this week is “friend”. Simon and Garfunkel sing of “… old friends/sit on the park-bench like bookends … ”
There can be no better or more accurate evocation of the ethos that drives my notion of friendship than this line from a little pop song.
It contains the possibility of memories, mistakes, understanding, acceptance, regret – all connected by the magic phrase.
The dictionary defines a friend as a person one knows, likes and trusts; any associate or acquaintance, one with whom one is allied in a struggle or a cause, a comrade.
A friend is one who supports, sympathises with or patronises a group, cause or movement.
The Quakers are also called the Religious Society of Friends, and address each other as “friends”.
There is an archetypal story of a Quaker who wakes in the middle of the night to hear a burglar downstairs. Although pious and non-violent by nature, he still goes downstairs with a blunderbuss and addresses the intruder: “Friend, I would not harm thee in any way, but thou standest roughly where I am about to shoot.”
Dictionary meanings for this nebulous concept are inadequate. Definitions can never come closer than merely concretising some personalised experience of the diaphanous yet real phenomenon called friendship.
It transcends words. It has no parameters or boundaries. It is not affected or influenced by social standing, race, class or educational status. It is not confined nor expanded by time or space. It just exists, inexplicable, constant, steadfast and sometimes insanely bizarre.
Charles Darwin holds that a man’s best measure of his worth are his friends. My good old dad used to tell me: Show me your friends and I will tell you who you are.
Thomas Fuller, a Negro slave who was also a master mathematician, states robustly: If you have one true friend, you have more than your share.
The sublime Helen Keller stated: I would rather walk with a friend in the dark, than alone in the light.
And the magisterial Ralph Waldo Emerson claims: The only way to have a friend is to be one.
The more poetic Samuel Taylor Coleridge said: “Friendship is a sheltering tree.” One can see how there are “high” and “low” notions that attempt to describe friendship.
After my dear wife, Ruth, passed on about five sad years ago, it became incrementally plain that lady friends were more in evidence than during our marriage of over 57 years.
My pals would nudge me and suggest that perhaps one of those kind ladies who plied me with fresh scones and freshly-baked bread were perhaps candidates for the vast chasm Ruth left.
When I explained that they were only “friends”, they could hardly hide the cocked eyebrow of the nudge-nudge, wink-wink type.
What they don’t understand is that friendship can better be explained in simple terms by what it is not. It is not driven by expectation or agenda. It is not gender-specific. It allows for mistakes.
Its only virtue is its veracity, its willingness to be true to itself. In other words, friendship is its own highest virtue. It doesn’t depend on carnal satisfaction, doesn’t require physical presence, is not affected by long absences or daily contact.
It just keeps on asking the same simple question in varying and variously-intense ways: How are you? And then they really, really listen.
Good friends can sense your psychic state and home into it in a way that reassures you things will be fine.
I have many friends like that. There is Maud, Basil, George, Beukie, Julio and so forth. But this is not a rogue’s gallery. I can’t name them all. This column just states one simple definition of friendship: the only time a friend gets in the way is when you are on your way down.
* Literally Yours is a weekly column from Cape Argus reader Alex Tabisher. He can be contacted on email by [email protected].
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
Do you have something on your mind; or want to comment on the big stories of the day? We would love to hear from you. Please send your letters to [email protected].
All letters to be considered for publication, must contain full names, addresses and contact details (not for publication).