I've been wanting to write about this for quite some time now, and I think I'm finally going to start. There's a book out there called
The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin
Thomason. It might be one of the best books I've ever read (as I mentioned in a previous post). Actually, there shouldn't be a "might" in that previous statement. The premise of the book is some ancient secret that is getting people on a college campus killed. But, far more importantly, the book is a meditation on friendship, what it means, why it's there, and what becomes of it. It's powerful stuff.
There's one paragraph that has always stood out in my mind. It was one of those things that I read on my first run through, and I had to put the book aside and just think about it. these guys have some powerful insights into this friendship business, and I'd like to share that particular paragraph here.
"Hope, Paul said to me once, which whispered from Pandora's box only after all the other plagues and sorrows had escaped, is the best and last of all things. Without it, there is only time. And time pushes at our backs like a centrifuge, forcing us outward and away, until it nudges us into oblivion. That, I think, is the only explanation for what happened to my father and me, just as it happened to Taft and Curry, the same way it will happen to the four of us here in Dod, inseparable as we may seem. It's a law of motion, a fact of physics that Charlie could name, no different from the stages of white dwarfs and red giants. Like all things in the universe, we are destined from birth to diverge. Time is simply the yardstick of our separation. If we are particles in a sea of distance, exploded from an original whole, then there is a science to our solitude. We are lonely in proportion to our years."
For those of you that pay attention, you'll find my own, inadequate attempt at spouting the same philosophy in
this post. But think about that for a second. Look past the names of the characters that make no sense if you haven't read the book, and think about what the authors are saying here.
For those of you (most of you) who have not read this book, the focus of the book is four friends who attend college. They think they are inseparable, but through the course of the book, the ties that bind them as friends erode until they are almost gone. It's painful at times to read.
I am a person who values my friends above all else in my life. My friends are my family, and I like to think that I'll have my friends forever. This philosophy, then, was very hard for me to stomach, this preposterous idea that the friends I had at the time would not be the friends I have now, that the friends I have now are not going to be the friends I have in the future. That thought scares me very, very much.
Yet, looking back on previous friendships, its easy to see the truth in this. I think about all the friends I used to have and have since lost touch with. I think about the friends I used to have whose interests have diverged from my own, and we stopped hanging out because there was no more common ground. And the thought of it saddens me, but it is the grim reality of life.
Does this mean that, perhaps, we are creatures MEANT for solitude? Sure, we all crave friendship, companionship, people to like us and be around us, but does that necessarily deny the idea that we are meant for isolation? Think about the people in your past that you have lost touch with. What about the people you know now? Do you think You'll know them forever?
Think, for a moment, about the way friendships evolve over the course of one's life. We start out in the younger years having hordes of friends (for the most part, little kids tend to get along with most everybody), and we spend as much time with them as our parents will allow. We sleep over at their houses; we have enormous birthday parties. As we grow older, our true friends thin out. Sure, we know lots of people, but how many of them do we hang out with. In actuality, probably fewer than we did when we were younger. Other things start becoming important: school, work, girl/boyfriends, and we slowly start losing the time we once had for actually hanging out with our friends. Fast forward a few more years, and we are all working adults with families or are working hard to get there. Our friends are people we see once in a while, email every couple of weeks, get together for a BBQ on occasion. We slowly move away from hanging out with friends to being more involved with work and/or family... our friends slowly fading into the background until they barely occupy our thoughts.
But doesn't the idea of "family" preclude the idea that we are always moving further away from people. Perhaps. Can't argue with the fact that marriage is (ideally) a lifelong bond of love between two people. But consider for a moment the steadily rising failure rate of marriages. Are we, speaking on a societal level, losing the capacity for true love? Have we, as a society, moved so far away from our center, been pushed so close to oblivion, that we are forgetting what is at the core of us, as humans?
None of these are questions that I would presume to answer, as it's impossible to know. I am, however, interested to hear what anybody who's reading this has to say about it. Feel free to comment/email me. Are we lonely in proportion to our years?
