I
hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that
each protects the solitude of the other. - Rainer Maria Rilke
Only
those who savour solitude are capable of true friendship. Only when
two people do not need one another can they become friends in the
deep meaning of the word. In this intimate dance of souls, the self
becomes the other and the other becomes the self. And yet, it is the
separateness of the two that propels the movement. At the heart of
friendship lies the Gelassenheit, the letting go of the other.
Inevitably this is followed by the expectation of their return, when
it happens, if it happens. Whilst solitude is essential for
cultivating a state of not needing the other, paradoxically it is
precisely the other that enables us not to need. The word ‘alone’
derives from ‘all one’ and a friend is someone with whom we can
be all one, with whom we can be alone. Whilst “we live as we dream
— alone” (Conrad, Heart of Darkness), we delight in sharing our
aloneness.
One
might think of friendship as a camaraderie of ‘free spirits’,
who, at every moment, make a conscious choice to be close to each
other without the need to possess, to enslave or to serve. While
slaves cannot be friends, tyrants cannot have friends. “What we
commonly call friends and friendships”, says Montaigne, “are no
more than acquaintanceships and familiarities, contracted either by
chance or for advantage, which have brought our minds together. In
the friendship I speak of, they mix and blend into one another in so
perfect a union that the seam which has joined them is effaced and
disappears.” Such union can only take place between individuals,
between undivided selves.
Friendship
was greatly valued by the ancient Greeks. Yet, according to
Aristotle, no friend is to be preferred to truth, which is greater
than any finite human being can be. He stated of his friendship with
Plato: “Plato is my friend, but truth is a greater friend”. A
true friend is not some incarnation of the nymph Echo that only tells
us what we want to hear; a friend tells us what we daren’t see in
ourselves. When a self-induced disaster befalls us, we can invoke his
soft yet persistent probing: “Could you have done it differently?”
Nietzsche,
like the ancients, held friendship above erotic love and considered
agon (a contest) to be an indispensable ingredient of it: “in your
friend you should have your best enemy”! In this he echoed W.R.
Emerson: “let him be to thee a sort of beautiful enemy, untameable,
devoutly revered and not a trivial convenience to be soon outgrown
and cast aside” (from his essay Friendship). Hence, beware of those
who echo you in a flattering fashion, and also of those who reduce
you to an echo!
Friendship
is about sharing an ideal, sometimes more precious than life itself.
Such was the camaraderie of those who were facing death in the
desolate trenches of the Great War. Saving a friend from extinction
sometimes required the sacrifice of one’s own life; serving one’s
country in peril was a higher ideal still. Every heroic endeavour
implies readiness to die for the ideal that stands above the earthly
existence of the individual. It dispenses with utility and transports
us into the realm of the transcendental. Nietzsche extolled the ideal
of friendship thus: “There is, to be sure, here and there on earth
a kind of continuation of love in which the greedy desire of two
persons for one another has given way to a new desire and a new
greed, a common higher thirst for an ideal that stands above them:
but who knows this love? Who has experienced it? Its rightful name is
friendship” (The Gay Science; I:14). A sense of uniqueness is
implied here, uniqueness of the ideal and uniqueness of the friend
who shares this ideal with us.
A
friend makes us feel fully ourselves without the fear of being judged
or rejected; he is like a mirror that helps us to become ourselves.
In his presence, we can discard the mask. A friend sees the good in
us when the rest of the world doubts it, when we ourselves doubt it;
a friend is someone who walks in when others walk out. For Hamlet, it
was the loyal, unwavering Horatio who quietly gave him courage to
face the hostile, treacherous world. He was also someone to whom
Hamlet was not afraid to show the vulnerable, anguished and also
loving side of himself. It was in Horatio’s arms that Hamlet died,
and it was Horatio who was left to mourn the ‘sweet Prince’ and
tell his story to the world. Perhaps “to become what one is”,
even the great ones must have a ‘Horatio’ by their side?
Especially the great. And this is what Nietzsche, the advocate of
hardness, solitude and self-sufficiency, wrote to his ‘Horatio’:
“My dear friend; what is this – our life? A boat that swims in
the sea, and all one knows for certain about it is that one day it
will capsize. Here we are, two good old boats that have been faithful
neighbours, and above all your hand has done its best to keep me from
capsizing!” (in a letter to Franz Overbeck, November, 1881).
When
we are in deep suffering and despair, no words can bring solace. The
silent, compassionate presence of the other is all that is needed.
This can be brief, but it must be sincere. A moment of shared,
wordless stillness becomes a moment of friendship; it is also the
moment when healing begins. We treasure the memories of these ‘spots
of time’ in our hearts and return to them when despair returns to
overwhelm us. To use the metaphor from Bergman’s unforgettable film
of the same name, they become our “wild strawberries”.
Dr.
Eva Cybulska
