The Warehouse of Good Intentions

On Folly and Friendship

A few weekends ago, I hosted a dinner party. It was an odd, unlikely crew. There was the nice Hillsdale boy from the Catholic institute, along with some fairly raucous—but nevertheless charming—friends from Divinity School. I made potato, leek, and artichoke soup, then vowed never to include artichoke in anything again. The process of gutting it to extract the heart is not only painstaking and treacherous, but you’re also just left with one sad little lump of flesh that hardly makes a spectacle of itself.

Speaking of spectacles, there were several memorable moments that night, given that, as I just mentioned, these were a mixed bunch. I had also opened up the invitation to Twitter, and three people I’d never met before ended up attending. One was a tall Russophile in Private Equity, another a charming PhD in Chinese literature, and the last a small undergraduate majoring in philosophy, with a penchant for Wittgenstein and a dangerously thin, short mustache. In the email invitation, I had included both Kant’s dinner party rules from Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View—the most important of which emphasized the sanctity of secrecy and self-discipline—and asked that everyone bring a small excerpt from a cherished work. The Chinese literature PhD recited and translated a beautiful Tang poem that moved me to tears at the time, though I remember none of it now, and the Russophile read an excerpt from The Gulag Archipelago.

At one point in the evening, a friend announced they thought they would be an excellent politician, because they recognized they were “capable of great cruelty.” Later on, the same friend declared that, at many points in their life, they had experienced “profound loneliness,” and were drawn to God because of “the promise of a reunion with Love itself.”

All in all, it was a good time.

Having a group of friends who are not just extensions of my boyfriend’s social circles or men who are plotting to sleep with me is a fairly new phenomenon. Much of this is my fault. Since I was a teenager, I had a very exploitative, utilitarian view of friendship. I was so afraid of wasting precious time that I believed I should only have one or two friends, one of whom was always a boyfriend, in order to maximize productivity. Throughout my life, there have more or less been two types of men who fall in love with me, though they all grapple with an intense selbstkampf. The first kind are happy-go-lucky types, unburdened by dogma. They just want to recite Byron and make cakes all day, though if duty compels them to make sacrifices on the ancestral hearth, it usually does not include me. A subcategory of the first includes bohemian layabouts who think all politicians are Hitler and that you can best make money by spending your father’s. These inevitably bore of me; they all come from wealth or secretly want it more than anything, and so eventually fall for some self-hating, soul-searching scioness. The second are usually ultra-orthodox legalists, who eventually reveal themselves to be incestuous race scientists or would-be monks. None of these relationships have been particularly conducive to re-ordering my understanding of what a good and healthy friendship should be. I learned, probably too late, that issues with friendships bleed into relationships because relationships are of course one big, complicated friendship. This has particularly dire consequences when I substitute a man’s will for my conscience, which blocks out the voice of God.

My utilitarian understanding of friendship was first challenged when I read Francis de Sales’s Introduction to the Devout Life at about seventeen. He writes:

“Friendship is the most dangerous of all types of love, since other kinds may be had without intercommunication, but friendship is completely based on it, and we can hardly have such communication with a person without sharing in its qualities. All love is not friendship, first, because we can love without being loved. In such cases there is love but not friendship, since friendship is mutual love, and if it is not mutual it is not friendship… All such things concern the senses, and therefore friendships preceding from them are termed sensual, vain, frivolous and deserve to be called folly rather than friendship. When playful friendships like these are between persons of different sexes with no intention of marriage, they are called fond loves. They are only abortive births, or rather phantoms of friendship, and deserve the name neither of friendship nor or love by reason of their complete vanity and deep imperfection.”

I was, and still am, simultaneously drawn to and repelled by these passages. I recognize in them great wisdom, but I also want to insist, indignantly, that I am not a monk and that this is overkill. My ex-boyfriend’s mother’s friend, who didn’t believe in nail polish and once bought him new swim shorts that settled at his knees when they went to the beach, comes to mind.

Like anyone, I am helplessly worldly, to the point where my Dominican—the order, not the country—spiritual director would insist that I ‘add pride and vainglory’ to my list of sins whenever I finished a confession. I have no wisdom to offer, besides maybe that these are worthwhile questions to ponder. I am still unsure of a resolution. I struggle with relationships that don’t demand a unique brand of loyalty. Family, priests, boyfriends, all demand such a special loyalty. Friends are far more complicated; there are no strict terms and conditions, and no blood. Of course, family is already blood; with boyfriends there is the assumption and aspiration towards unity of blood; with priests there is the covenant of the blood of Christ. With friends, there is just faith and effort. When I was breaking up with my ex-boyfriend, he told me: “when I was walking up to you on Valentine’s Day with flowers, all I could think about was ‘blood is thicker than water.’” It was one of the cruelest things anyone had ever said to me.

My friendships with women have always been fraught, mainly because I struggle with competition and comparison. When women imitate me, they copy me; when men imitate me, I’ve inspired them.

The first half of undergrad, I had two close friendships, both of which ended because we were swallowed whole by our ambition. In the second half, I socialized mainly with my ex-boyfriend's friends, who came from a long line of men who believe plundering the world’s resources to be their birthright. At Penn, like all finishing schools for the elite, you rubbed shoulders with the cream of perversion, skimmed off the top of generations.

Trying to figure out how to be a truly good friend in graduate school doesn’t seem particularly ideal, I know. There is a real monastic quality to graduate study, especially when your institution also happens to be the autism capital of America. However, it may not be as bizarre or untimely as it seems. Though it has secular roots among the pagan Greeks, the tradition of Christian friendship developed primarily in monastic circles. The model of the monastic community was the Greek Philia model, where men explored philosophic truths through amicable discourse. St. Basil of Caesarea christianized the idea of the philosophical community described by Aristotle, and Augustine developed the idea even further, influenced not only by his Christian and Greek predecessors but also by the Ciceronian understanding of friendship. The monk Evagrius Ponticus uses the expression “spiritual friendship” first in his Scholies to Proverbs which discusses friendship in connection with the saints, who are the friends of God; the angels, who are specially linked to man through virtue and knowledge; and ultimately Christ, the greatest friend. Evagrius defined salvation as the existence of virtue and knowledge of God, and considered it to be the way in which God rendered his enemies friends. He wrote that communion in Christ was for those who are friends of God, and if men are capable of love for each other, it is only because they are friends of the same person —Christ. The understanding of salvation therefore was also that of friendship restored between men and God.

I digress, but this is all to say, that there is always time, and there is no wrong place. However, I am not here to judge. I have immense sympathy for how destructive loneliness can be. In the ninth grade, I remember being fascinated by the late UChicago professor John Cacioppo’s work on the relationship between loneliness and physical sickness; the way loneliness can alter your white blood cells and weaken your immune system. We also know by now that a broken heart can literally kill you; it can cause arrhythmias, pulmonary edemas, and blood clots that block ventricles.

Another mental stumbling-block has been the issue of writing, which remains one of the driving impulses of my life. I remember reading an interview with French writer Annie Ernaux, and being repulsed by the fact that she declared that sometimes she had affairs and sexual experiences just so she had something to write about. I was repulsed not just because I found it morally objectionable, but because I recognized that instinct in myself. Of the nine muses, there are none called Eros. Nevertheless, writing from life requires a certain parasitic instinct that is difficult to cultivate alongside moral virtues. I think even an innocent, ignorant person can see that there is something profane and wicked about writing from life, or the writer qua scientist. In my experience, writing destroys living friendships more often than it strengthens them. It’s not like an autopsy, more like the gladiatorial games— you are watching people get cut down in real time. The famous sentence from Albert Thibaudet’s book, Le Style de Flaubert, comes to mind: “La rage des phrases t’a desséché le cœur” — “Your mania for sentences has dried up your heart.”

Getting older and therefore ever closer to marriage, these are all things I have thought about at length. Marriage is one of the few realms in which sharing usually means you don’t love someone or something enough. Ultimate loyalty is required, and with this comes an exponential narrowing of possibilities.

One of my most beloved friends, even now, is a professor I met in college. I would never have crossed paths with him had my father not pointed out that I should take a class with him. He’d invited him to participate on a panel about ten years before. I hadn’t the remotest interest in Chinese history, but I knew better than to ignore my father’s advice. When I met this professor I told him about my father, but he didn’t seem to remember who he was, or the occasion. I didn’t mind; making inroads with a Sinologist didn’t seem like it would do much for me. Our friendship developed in other ways. He enjoyed my first assignment and invited me to chat. It was a vague prompt asking for our thoughts on contemporary expressions of Nationalism; I had just read Cassirer’s Myth of the State and undoubtedly cribbed much of his insight. What it really was, I think, is he liked the way I spoke. The anachronistic environment in which I grew up was familiar to him. He liked my ‘old world charm,’ and my love for academic gossip. Any brilliant insights he may have attributed to me were undoubtedly incidental or inherited from my father; I can’t take credit for them, and never have.

He wasn’t a surrogate-father; I already had a father I loved very much, and whom I was very close to. It was just a mysterious meeting of souls. In my previous piece, I mentioned briefly that I believe God’s graces are often imparted through other people—there was something like that going on here. My friendship with him was not like a father-daughter relationship, nor was it like the relationships I have with men my age, my past boyfriends, or my priests. There were elements of all these different kinds in our friendship, given that I was devoted to him, confided in him, and always took him at his word. I had a sense, also, that we were drawn to each other because we were deeply similar. Indeed, my spiritual director tells me that we’re drawn to people with whom we share similar spiritual wounds.

The other day, one of my friends was speaking to me about how jarring it was to find out that one of his childhood friends was having a baby. I asked my professor about this, as my foil, my insight into what life will be like fifty years on. “Yes,” he said, “I understand this. The women I have loved have all had children.”

He then proceeded to name every woman he had ever loved, with a brief description of all of them:

“All of them were wonderful. There was no drama of pursuit, but such total fulfillment. Such intimacy; they were all beautiful, smart, good. But when I met my wife in 1983 I knew immediately. All madness, but a blessing, my eight: seven deeply good and smart, one was mentally unbalanced but brilliant; a superb classical pianist and amazing in bed. As my psychiatrist said, ‘Sir, you have had the good fortune of meeting many powerfully erotic women…’ Yes, an éducation sentimentale. One is even older than I am; she’s a little old lady now, still in Harvard Square. One of my students visited her. We met from time to time, and always made love. Until forty years ago. Yes, I have wasted much love, much time, and much semen…”

He is remarkable. His Multiple Sclerosis is progressing and he can’t walk, but he’s a joy, full of vitality. I am alarmed, though, by how much he remembers, and how much he still yearns. I hope I don’t turn out the same. The literary love of my life, Saul Bellow, who for so many years was my model for most things, also had countless love affairs. “Men and women simply want to extract from each other what cannot be taken out by any means,” he writes somewhere (I’ve now forgotten).

Often when I think of my failures as a friend, I think of a letter Bellow wrote to Martin Amis in 1996, when he was in his early eighties:

“My dear Martin:

I see that I’ve become a very bad correspondent. It’s not that I don’t think of you. You come into my thoughts often. But when you do, it appears to me that I owe you a particularly grand letter. And so you end up in the “warehouse of good intentions”: ‘Can’t do it now,’ ‘Then put it on hold.’ This is one’s strategy for coping with old age, and with death—because one can’t die with so many obligations in storage. Our clever species, so fertile and resourceful in denying its weaknesses…”

There are many people I love. Too often, they’ve been sorted into similar such warehouses. If you don’t touch something, if you don’t interfere with it, you cannot destroy it. But, as we all know, it will decay.