Reflections on friendship. Quoted from books.
and We can hear them too because We have Converged and Crashed and Collided and We are watching Eliza Bright in this moment — all of Us are — and We need to pause for a word on Friendship because the others wouldn’t know what this is if it Bit Them In The Literal Ass — most people say friends when they mean acquaintances and any people they don’t hate but when We say Friends We mean what is true — Family — the people We have and hold forever, even when We look at them and see only rage — where We can go from screaming at Each Other to screaming with Each Other in that binary way like a switch flipping — No to Yes and False to True — even after everything happens that’s about to happen and even after Eliza and Suzanne don’t live in the same state they will go on being Friends and that’s Our Meaning of Friends — Heartfriends — Chosen Family and We Embrace Eliza by proxy because Our Suzanne is Ours and they are Each Other’s for years and years to come and this is the sort of Kinship that We need to survive in this unfeeling world and it is Sad — Sad in the same way Preston is Sad — that the others don’t get to know it and they don’t understand it and they scramble for it in their mythmaking and their obsession and their constant pinging into the internet void as they pray in desperation that the others are listening — but they do not have the ‘and’ in them — not really
— A. E. Osworth, We Are Watching Eliza Bright (Grand Central Publishing, 2022)
It’s important to keep in mind, given what I’m about to relay, which is everything I remember from that evening, that I had truly never had a real friend before. Growing up I’d only had Joanie, who disliked me, and a girlfriend or two here and there in grade school, usually the other class reject. I remember a girl with braces on her legs in junior high, and an obese girl in high school who barely spoke. There was an Oriental girl whose parents owned the one Chinese restaurant in X-ville, but even she discarded me when she made the cheerleading squad. Those were not real friends. Believing that a friend is someone who loves you, and that love is the willingness to do anything, sacrifice anything for the other’s happiness, left me with an impossible ideal, until Rebecca. I held the phone close to my heart, caught my breath. I could have squealed with delight. If you’ve been in love you now this kind of exquisite anticipation, this ecstasy. I was on the brink of something, and I could feel it. I suppose I was in love with Rebecca. She awoke in my heart some long sleeping dragon. I’ve never felt that fire burning like that again. That day was without a doubt the most exciting day of my life.
— Ottessa Moshfegh. Eileen. New York: Penguin, 2015. p. 191.
It is through intimate non-threatening interaction with another human being that many of the most important lessons in managing our energy are learned. We need spiritual friends.
— David Brazier. The Feeling Buddha: A Buddhist Psychology of Character, Adversity, and Passion. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Chapter 16, “Psychotherapy,” p. 109.
When Amy ended our friendship, everything I had always known and soundly ignored cackled in my face like a hyena. As far as she knew, she was rejecting my—admittedly imperfect—companionate affection. But it seared marrow-deep as a repudiation of unconfessed love. It didn’t matter, I realized, that I had always shied away from pursuing a relationship with her—that I had, ultimately, wanted Paul more. I had loved her too, as a friend, and as someone I had desired: mourning her, I realized, would be a wretched ordeal.
And so it has been. So it is. Losing her has been one of the great heartaches of my adulthood: exponentially more painful than leaving my first husband and, in some ways, more humiliating.”
* * *
“I am empathetic, generally. I am loving, nearly always. But I was an inconsistent, sometimes greedy friend to Amy, and whether this unspooled from silent romantic affection ultimately doesn’t apply to the case. What I tried to be was a platonic friend, and when she judged me on that basis—when she considered how I measured up against what she wanted—Amy felt compelled to let me go.”
* * *
“Once in a while I lapse into self-castigation and call myself a chump for struggling so in the wake of a lost friendship that, by now, has calcified. Sometimes, mercifully, I forget about Amy. Often enough, I remember her with something like empathy and sad acceptance. But every now and then, I feel a fool. I ought not—I know this. We have all shit the friendship bed at some time or another.”
— Rachel Vorona Cote. Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2020.
...a definition of a breakup: the moment after which people no longer share an interpretation of their relationship; the point after which neither party has either the right or the ability to shape the stories that either tells about what passed between them. The advantage of this definition is that it requires mourning to take place in the absence of a hope that one day one's record will be cleared, one’s reputation restored. It had served the additional purpose of explaining why everyone who dated me before I got sober hated me: they simply had a different narrative.
— Grace Lavery. Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis. Seal Press, 2022. p. 135.By late afternoon he was dead. Schiller was forty-five years old. * * * on 12 May Schiller was buried in the graveyard of Weimar's St Jakobskirche, a short fifteen-minute walk from Goethe’s house. Feigning illness, Goethe didn’t attend the funeral. He couldn't. 'I lose a friend and, with him, half of my own life,' he said, mourning 'my irreplaceable Schiller'. Everybody feared for Goethe. 'I'm afraid the old man will turn entirely to stone now,' Friedrich Schlegel wrote... On Goethe’s desk was a pile of papers covered in Schiller's handwriting – his unfinished Demetrius. They had discussed the play in so much detail that Goethe said, 'I could write the rest of his Demetrius myself.'
— Andrea Wulf. Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self. Knopf, 2022.“I tell them [young people] that the word ‘search’ has meant a daring existential journey, not a finger tap to already existing answers; that ‘friend’ is an embodied mystery that can be forged only face-to-face and heart-to-heart; and that ‘recognition’ is the glimmer of homecoming we experience in our beloved’s face, not ‘facial recognition.’”
— Shoshana Zuboff. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Public Affairs, 2020.
