'Distance Only Cannot Change the Heart'

The digital age has enabled a new and more generous definition of friendship. Geographical proximity is no longer a necessary component. It’s a truism that making new friends becomes more difficult with age, but at seventy-three I have more friends than at any time in my life. I’m not bragging. I still have friends I’ve known for more than sixty years but with the internet, distance is erased. Common interests, civility, a sense of humor, temperamental affinities – these become the criteria that shape a friendship, not sharing an office or riding the same bus to work.

 

On July 9, 1785, William Cowper was writing a letter to the Rev. John Newton. It’s typical Cowper – gossipy, affectionate, cranky and utterly devoted to his friend: “No man’s disapprobation would have hurt me more. Your favourable sentiments of my book [The Task] must consequently give me pleasure in the same proportion.” Originally, Cowper intended to write a poem to Newton. Instead, he wrote him a letter and redirected the poem to another friend, Joseph Hill, whom he had known since childhood. Hill was an attorney who served as the poet’s legal and financial adviser, even when Cowper attempted suicide and was committed to an asylum. “An Epistle to Joseph Hill, Esq.” begins like this:

 

“Dear Joseph,— five and twenty years ago—

Alas! how time escapes — ’tis even so!—

With frequent intercourse and always sweet

And always friendly we were wont to cheat

A tedious hour, — and now we never meet,

As some grave gentleman in Terence says,

(’Twas therefore much the same in ancient days,)

Good lack, we know not what to-morrow brings,—

Strange fluctuation of all human things!”

 

Cowper celebrates not merely his affection for Hill but the importance of friendship in general: “Changes will befall, and friends may part, / But distance only cannot change the heart.” He might be writing about friendships formed and sustained thanks to the internet. Cowper’s lines can be lachrymose and rigidly predictable but at his best he is piercingly human.

 

That a suicidally tormented man should have written letters and poems that are still readably charming, funny and moving after more than two centuries, defies the modern understanding of human personality. As poet and man, Cowper can’t be reduced to clinical categories for easy comprehension. Though depressed and reclusive, comfortable only among a small circle of friends and family, and then only in a rural setting, Cowper wrote letters that rival Keats’ as the finest in the language (that both poets suffered lends a plangent quality to everything they wrote, though that alone is not sufficient to explain their literary qualities). They carry philosophical and emotional freight lightly -- never a sermon or treatise, always a conversation. The English poet Norman Nicholson in 1951 published William Cowper, a study of the poet, in which he writes:

 

“His was a strange life and a strange personality; witty, and yet warped; warm-hearted, impulsive, and yet timid and reserved; sociable, and yet solitary; sympathetic, tolerant, understanding, and yet bigoted; gay and yet pathetic; endearing and lovable and yet never receiving all the love he needed. . . . Not even Chekov, carefully selecting significant trivia, could tell us more about his characters than Cowper tells about himself in a chance remark on a hat or cat, a chair or a hare. Strange as he was, most poets are strangers compared with him. His very oddness is so companionable that we can understand his freaks and foibles better than we can understand the normal actions of saner men.”