'In Reality Life Hasn’t Changed Much'

There are no generic, one-size-fits-all friends. Think of each as a species, not a genus. Correspondingly, with each we mutate and become, at least briefly, different people. Human sensibility is not monolithic and unchanging. We are plural. With each friend we share a different set of memories and expectations. Some friendships are strictly cerebral. In others we can indulge in the confessional mode or tell dirty jokes. Friendship can spill into love, and love, if enduring, almost certainly must contain friendship. There are power imbalances and friendships in which power plays little role. Some are happily cold, others uneasily hot. There’s nothing hypocritical or duplicitous about what I’m describing. Humans are more complicated than we choose to believe. 

A Garden Carried in a Pocket: Letters 1964-1968 (ed. Thomas Meyer, Green Shade, 2004) collects some of the letters exchanged by Guy Davenport and Jonathan Williams. In his introductory note Davenport writes:

 

“The self, as some fancy psychologists have said, is always several selves, a congeries of identities. We like people who make us like ourselves (Jonathan is one of these). We tend to have a different self for all our acquaintances, accomplished hypocrites that we are. Consequently, we never really know another person. What’s going on in a friendship is that friends find each other interesting, appreciate each other’s jokes (this complicates things for the readers of other people’s mail), and enjoy each other’s company.”

 

A friend and former newspaper colleague now living in Philadelphia wrote to me on Friday:

 

“I thought of you recently when the Inquirer published a real gem of a crime report. I would have loved to have witnessed this.

 

“A couple of officers responded to a report of a burglary in progress. When they arrived at the address they saw a U-Haul truck pulling away from the curb. They followed it, until the driver of the truck stopped suddenly, jumped out and ran up to the police car and said, ‘I don’t want anything to do with this, and there’s a body in the back.’ He was quite right. There was a body in the back, dismembered in a trash bag. I do love a good crime story.”

 

Now that’s a friend – someone who thinks of you when they read a satisfying dismemberment story. Tim recently finished reading Proust’s masterwork: “I read the volumes slowly over several years. It was too intense to read them one after another. I loved the ending, in which the writer decides to write a novel about what we’ve just read. The descriptions of parties is another favorite.”

 

Now he’s reading another favorite, Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: “The history and the cultural background are great, but the things that I like the most are the simple descriptions of a day’s travels — the homes, the monasteries, the people met on a bridge.”

 

You can see why Tim would be so good and interesting a friend. And he’s full of surprises: “I’ve survived and have been vaccinated. It felt like a death sentence had been lifted. In reality life hasn’t changed much.”