'What Is Essential Is to Love Them'

“Along with Montaigne, along with Sir Thomas Browne or Alfonso Reyes, [Charles] Lamb (1775-1834) belongs to that agreeable species of those who across the generations maintain a personal relationship with each reader.”

Readers in the digital age have grown accustomed to a new and unexpected understanding of friendship. Physical proximity is no longer required. What we might call proximity of sensibility is. Some of the people whose company I value most I don’t ever expect to meet in person. They are smart and well-read. They wield a nicely ironic sense of wit. They have paid attention and know things. They can tell a story concisely. They have much in common with gifted conversationalists. They are not egomaniacs. Of course, such a novel friendship model has a well-established literary precursor: the lifelong relationships we build with writers, many of whom died long ago.

The passage at the top is from the prologue Jorge Luis Borges wrote to a Spanish-language edition of Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales of Shakespeare in 1966. Borges continues: “They [Montaigne, Browne, et al.] are doubtless admirable but we can’t admire them, as often happens between friends; what is essential is to love them.” This is not a sentiment endorsed by academics and other sophisticates, but non-aligned amateur readers will get it. We love Evelyn Waugh. We love A.J. Liebling. Make your own list. Admire is too anemic a verb. Such relationships transcend mere scholarly interest, just as a friendship transcends mere acquaintance or our dealings with the guy at the convenience store who sells cigarettes and milk. More Borges on Lamb and his sister:

“They whiled away their days with tranquil passions: exercises of letters, the friendship of Coleridge and Hazlitt, the arbitrary and labyrinthine literary style of the seventeenth century, the acquisition of venerable folios and antique porcelain. Also whist: he delighted in the rigor of its rules and hated those idle persons who played just to play. He desired a heaven that would not exclude the different flavors of wine, or kinds of birds, the festive light of candelabra, friendly and ironic jokes. He was incapable of resisting, in conversation, the most atrocious puns.”

[See Borges on Shakespeare, ed. Grace Tiffany, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2018.]