Hegel was not wrong in thinking that romanticism was the fulfillment of Christian art, and therefore also the fullest representation of Christian love—even if he considered his contemporary romantics already beyond the sphere of art. Rooting the promise of love and the constancy of friendship in loyalty, he writes that “friendship in this sense develops principally in youth. That is its moment in human life.” But, he adds, clearly each man must make his way in the world to a social position, make a name for himself, and start a family. Thus, friendship, which begins in “a fusion of feeling, will, and action,” is later dominated by more or less common material interests, which often give rise to discord. Even if one can still speak of friendship or intimacy in middle age, “it is no longer the friendship of youth, in which one of the two friends never decides anything without consulting the other and would never do anything that would make the other unhappy.”24
This view is characteristic of a “bourgeois” vision of the world, of a way of life subordinated to the demands of production and profitability, a “realist” vision that fits what we mean today by the word friendship, but that is, in fact, a contradiction split between the aspiration to an ideal companionship and a pragmatism calculated to replace a dream, creating a social context for amicable relationships while simultaneously draining them of their substance. Thus friendship as Montaigne conceived it, for example, would be no more than a sweet dream, a luxury enjoyed only by poets and the young—and by the ancients, who could attain it because they were focused more on spiritual than economic prosperity. From this perspective, Greek society would be to civilization what adolescence is to the evolution of the contemporary individual.
What other kinds of friendships are possible? That’s the key question. For, in fact, for the most part, what binds us to a friend is not at all concrete, and is more often a word than a contract, and it’s impossible to foresee all the conditions that may arise. What guarantees do we have that another’s word will be kept? Hannah Arendt considered a promise to be a way of diffusing an unpredictability rooted in a constitutional uncertainty—what will I be tomorrow?—and on “the impossibility of foreseeing the consequences of an act among a community of equals.”25 For her, a mutual promise assures the cohesion of a group when its members are dispersed. A promise maintains the ties of friendship that distance could otherwise erode. Friendship is also—just like love—something that is wanted, and a promise participates in this willingness; it is, according to Nietzsche’s construction, “a continuity within wanting,” “a veritable memory of the will.”26
This means that the man who has overcome this uncertainty, who “is like no one but himself,” the man who is “master of his own will, independent and persistent, the man who can promise” to use Nietzsche’s terms, has acquired a true self-understanding and self-reliance and so exercises a certain power over circumstances and time. He has his own internal judge, and finds the source of his values within himself. He is, in other words, a person who has attained virtue, or the “human excellence” theorized by the Greeks, and who attracts the kind of admiration that fosters the ties of friendship.
In light of this, I don’t see how Blanchot could have written: “Friendship is not a gift, not a promise, and not categorical generosity. As an incommensurable relationship between one person and another, it is the outside connected to its rupture and inaccessibility.”27 It’s not that I don’t agree with the second clause, it’s that I don’t agree that it excludes the first, except perhaps by reducing a promise to a word that determines the circumstances and engagements that bind friends. Blanchot is most likely using it in the generic sense, but at a deeper level, the promise is the motion that makes all friendly or loving relations dynamic. The “promised” is the product of a fundamental promise that could also be called a hope—a meaning that we still find in the phrase “the promise of,” which means the hope of—the hope that opens up the future in and for a loving or friendly community. Friends are always hoping for something that will fundamentally link them, and it’s not anything specific; for example, one does not hope that the other will change in some particular way or do some particular thing; rather, what friends hope for is hope itself, the very thing we live on, and friendship is the promise of an endless hope that allows friends to undertake together what they cannot do alone. And that requires us to never give up those youthful moments in which we think we’re going to accomplish today what, in fact, life will endlessly defer. You have to know, and without cynicism, how to occupy this very gap and how to keep a certain distance—which is, no doubt, what distinguishes childhood friendships from those of maturity. It’s in this sense that friendship is not a state but an activity, not an ergon but an energeia. Things that could be done without friendship, but that we never actually do, become, thanks to friendship, effectively and intellectually desirable, even imperative, to the point that we can’t imagine why we haven’t done them before—they seem that obvious.
This promise has a name: it is joy. It’s not just the pleasure of being together that fires the mind and provokes spontaneous laughter, the desire to joke about nothing and everything. It is, even more deeply, the tendency to go always a bit further, to surpass ourselves in the direction of what we do better together and can only accomplish together, the one with the other and each one for himself. What we give each other mutually, we consider as excess, without premeditation, as they say in cases of involuntary homicide. Except that, in this case, it’s a matter of life, not of death. To someone who complains that they haven’t done all for us that they could have, we say, “It’s the thought that counts.” But in this case, the gift surpasses the thought; it is pure promise, the promise to overflow our friendship toward a higher friendship, the paradoxical promise to attempt together what we could only do alone, one for the other: “Ah! seest thou not, O brother, that thus we part only to meet again on a higher platform, and only be more each other’s, because we are more our own? A friend is Janus-faced: he looks to the past and the future. He is the child of all my foregoing hours, the prophet of those to come, and the harbinger of a greater friend.”28
1Jean-Claude Fraisse, Philia. La Notion d’amitié dans la philosophie antique (Paris, Vrin, 1974), 20.
2Paul Veyne, “Introduction” to Seneca, Entretiens et Lettres à Lucilius (Paris, Robert Laffont, coll. “Bouquins,” 1993), VI.
3L. Dugas, L’Amitié antique (Paris, Félix Alcan, 1914), 1–2.
4Pierre Macherey, “Le ‘Lysis’ de Platon: dilemme de l’amité et de l’amour” in L’Amitié, dans son harmonie, dans ses dissonances, under the direction of Sophie Jankélévitch (Paris, Autrement, 1995), 64–65.
5See also Plutarch, Dialogues on Love 767 b-c, which, as Michel Foucault points out, “plays on the words sterguein, to love, and stegein, to harbor, to shelter in your home.” Le Souci de soi (Histoire de la Sexualite, III) (Paris, Gallimard, coll. “Bibliothèque des Histoires,” 1984), 237.
6Sagesses de l’amitié, anthology des textes philosophiques anciens, chosen and presented by Jacques Follon and James McEvoy (Paris, Cerf/Fribourg, Éditions universitaires de Fribourg, coll. “Vestigia,” 1997), 25–26.
7Hannah Arendt, “De l’humanité dans de sombres temps,” Vies politiques, trad. B. Cassin et P. Lévy (Paris, Gallimard, coll. “Les Essais,” 1974), 34.
8For more on this, see Jean-Luc Nancy, who, in his book La Communauté affrontée (Paris, Galilée, coll. “La Philosophie en effect,” 2001), returns to the idea of community that he developed in La Communauté désoeuvrée (Paris, Bourgois, coll. “Détroits,” 1986, new edition, 1999). In particular, he notes how much the idea of Gemeinschaft, for instance, is immediately associated with Hitler’s regime in Germany and recalls the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft.
9Maurice Blanchot, Pour l’amitié (Paris, Fourbis, 1996), 9.
10Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, VII, 7, 1241a 12, 1241a 15.
11Plato, The Republic, Book 1, 351c.
12Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, 1238a 1, 1238a 3
.
13Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship.
14Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, op. cit., 1238a 13, 1238a 14.
15Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, viii, 3 1156a 19-b 6.
16Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, viii, 3 1156a 19-b 6.
17See Philippe Ariès, L’Enfant et la vie familiale sous l’Ancien Régime (Paris, Seuil, coll. “L’Univers historique,” 1973). Anne Vincent-Buffault, L’Exercise de l’amitié. Pour une histoire des pratiques amicales aux XVIIIe e XIXe siècles (Paris, Seuil, coll. “La Couleur de la vie,” 1995)
18Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile … It’s at this age that one is able to share pleasure and suffering, to experience “compassion,” which, in “taking us out of ourselves” allows us to experience the suffering of others.
19Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality.
20As Allan Bloom has showed, stating that “Rousseau radicalizes the modern conception according to which man is essentially a being of feeling rather than a rational animal.” Love and Friendship (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993).
21To borrow the title of a beautiful film by Pascale Ferran.
22Friedrich Schlegel, Lucinde.
23Ibid.
24G. W. E Hegel, Aesthetics.
25Hannah Arendt, The Condition of Modern Man.
26F. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, Vol. 2.
27Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster.
28Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Friendship,” Essays: First Series, 1847.
All of Us
Michelle Herman
All of us were middle-aged. All of us were tired. All of us had children, many of them grown or almost grown. Two of us were single mothers of still-young adopted children and thus were especially tired, as was the one of us who’d given birth to twins the year before (at forty-five, after three rounds of IVF)—she was spectacularly tired, even though the father of the twins, who was nine years younger, was in residence, sleeping on the far side of their California King, the twins nestled between them.
But there wasn’t one of us who wasn’t tired: none of us had had a good night’s sleep in at least fifteen years. Fifteen? one of us said. Try twenty-one. (She was the one of us whose eldest daughter had just dropped out of Cornell and moved back home.) One of us—who had a thirteen-year-old daughter she’d adopted out of foster care the year before—wondered aloud then if she’d ever get a good night’s sleep again, and one of us (she was the mother of twin ten-month-olds with her much younger husband) said, God, seriously, I was just asking myself the same thing. Two of us—one whose twenty-seven-year-old daughter was teaching in China, and one whose son was seventeen and newly driving and who’d recently become a stepmother (her new husband, in a reversal of the paradigm, had left his young wife for her, a woman of his own age) to two children under four, of whom her husband shared joint custody with his abandoned young ex-wife—said, at exactly the same time, No, not a chance.
Three of us, in fact, were now stepmothers. One of us was a step-grandmother—her second husband’s daughter had just had a daughter of her own: the baby was five years and two months younger than our friend’s only child. We all call him Uncle Henry now, she had said last week when some of us were out to dinner and she passed around a photograph of her five-year-old son holding his baby niece.
At first, when John said it—just teasing, you know?—l was sure Henry would hate it. Remember last year when we told him he was going to be in his sister’s wedding? And he started crying and he wouldn’t stop? He kept saying, “I can’t, I don’t want to, I’m just a little kid,” and it took hours before I figured out that he thought it meant he was getting married? But somehow this is all right with him. He wants to bring the baby in for show-and-tell. He says he’s going to ask everybody in his kindergarten class to call him Uncle Henry.
Is that cute or is that awful? one of us, whose children were both in college, asked. Honestly, I just can’t tell.
He’s yanking your chain, one of us said. She was a psychotherapist; her children were teenagers. The rest of us laughed. Is that your professional opinion? one of us asked her.
No, really, said the one of us who was a step-grandmother (and the mother of five-year-old Henry, wife of John, stepmother of Minerva). I think he’s enjoying it. And he seems terribly amused that his half sister now refers to me as Grandma. “Let’s see if Grandma can figure out what you’re crying about,” she’ll say to the baby.
All of us groaned. None of us felt old enough—we weren’t old enough—to be grandmothers. One of us had just had twin babies! Two of us had started new careers within the last few years. We were forty-four through fifty-one years old. We were just getting used to middle age. Old age was next, still far away. One thing at a time, we told each other. But we knew it didn’t always work that way. Maybe it hardly ever did.
*
All of us had been friends for a long time—ten, twelve, fifteen, twenty years. Two of us went back further still, to college (the two who’d gone to college here, in this town, where all of us would end up living), and came into our circle as a pair. Among the rest of us, there was some uncertainty about who’d met whom first, who had been the last to join us, and (for that matter) when it was that we’d begun to think of us as us, a circle we eventually closed, allowing no one else to be admitted. None of us could recall when or how this had—by unspoken agreement—occurred either.
We’d met, all of us except the two who’d met in college and then claimed this town as home (or, perhaps, vice versa: were claimed by the town, which all of us found charming), when our careers and marriages—for all but four of us were married then—were just starting out. Very few of us had children. None of us who taught, either at the university or (as one of us did) at the high school, had yet been granted tenure. None of us had yet survived a life-threatening disease.
But that was when we were all in our early to midthirties. By middle age, three of us had been sick, one near death, and were now well. Three of us were sober alcoholics. Three of us now were unmarried. Four of us were in our second marriages; one of us was in a third. Only one of us had never married—although one of us had been divorced for so long that by her middle forties (she had married at twenty-two and divorced by twenty-six) she insisted that she could hardly remember what being married had been like. (Still, she said, she remembered well enough to know that she never wanted to be married again.)
One of us had married for the second time so long ago she swore she had retained no memory of her first marriage. None at all? the rest of us asked. Not even of the fights? Not even that, she said. Not even why you left?
Not even his name, she said, and all of us supposed that was a joke.
*
All of us, even those of us who still dressed the way we had at sixteen, who still wore our hair long (one of us had waist-length hair), relied on expensive beauty regimens. Two of us used Botox. All but four of us colored our hair (only two of us had let our hair go gray; the other two had not yet started to go gray). None of us had gone as far as plastic surgery, but some of us talked (idly, it was sworn) about it. (Perhaps, one of us said, if we lived on one of the coasts? The rest of us laughed, but a number of us wondered if this might be true.)
All but one of us had “issues”—only one of us did not invoke the word ironically, with scare quotes—about our weight. One of us had been thin all her life but tried not to be impatient when we spoke of low-carb versus counting calories, or when one of us complained of always being hungry or of being perfectly successful at Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig until 9:00 PM, when she would work her way through the refrigerator and the pantry before bed. Two of us had once been anorexic, one of us bulimic. One of us insisted she was overweight but wasn’t and had never been, at least not since we’d known her (had she ever? could it be? she was so thin!), and when she spoke of the diet she was on—she was always trying a new one, something none of us had heard of until she turned up at lunch or dinner worryi
ng over the restaurant’s intransigent menu—all of us (except the one of us who’d never in her life been on a diet) would become irritable, but we did our best to hide it. When, for example, she told all of us we had to try the Suzanne Somers diet—which, she explained, allowed fruit twenty minutes before carbohydrates or an hour before protein and fat, and forbade meals at which protein or fat coexisted with a carbohydrate—we tried not to roll our eyes.
In general, we tried not to roll our eyes over each other. We tried to excuse each other’s foibles, eccentricities, mistakes, and habits. We tried not to judge. But when one of us begged off on plans she had already made with us—as one of us often did—it was only with great effort that we did not speak of it, except to say, Not coming after all then? The one of us who often canceled was the only one of us who would not make plans to join us for dinner or a concert or a movie unless she knew her husband would be otherwise engaged—and if, at the last minute, it turned out that he would not be, she would break her date with us. (One of us, the playwright, did sometimes call her and her husband—who, when at a gathering together, stood side by side throughout—“the Bobbsey Twins,” but only in the presence of the two of us who we all knew could be relied upon not to repeat such a thing to all the rest of us.)
*
All of us were Democrats. All but one of us were irreligious. One of us had been a preacher’s kid. Three of us had been raised Catholic. Four of us were Jewish. One of us, raised Methodist, had converted to Judaism upon marriage, in her twenties, and was by middle age “more Jewish than” her husband (so her husband joked, she said—she herself did not make jokes about this): she volunteered at the synagogue to which they belonged. She washed the bodies of the dead: she was one of the Chevra Kadisha—the holy society. She did not keep kosher but she observed all holidays, including minor ones. All of us and all of our families were invited to come to dinner each autumn under the sukkah she reassembled every year, and for Purim, when our children were young enough to be interested, she would hold hamantaschen-making parties in her kitchen.
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