This is a famous apostrophe (a figure of speech from classical rhetoric wherein a speaker utters a provocative but unfinished phrase, most often one that tries to express deep emotion) sometimes ascribed to Aristotle. But it really gained traction in the 16th century French writer Michel Montaigne's Essay on Friendship. Montaigne, along with Shakespeare, was perhaps the clearest thinker in terms of explicating the emergence of the modern individual.
That is, sometime in the Renaissance people began thinking of themselves not just as members of a community (consensus fidelium -- the group of faithful under God in religious terms) but as distinctive individuals, each with a unique existence. For the most part, we tend to think of this as good thing: it led, for example, to the notion of individual rights built in to the American constitution. But, this transition also led to what former SNL writer and current US Senator Al Franken humorously called the "ME" decade of the 1970s where Americans, in particular, got consumed with themselves not as a country full of citizens helping one another but as narcissistic, solipsistic, autonomous actors.
Since at least Montaigne's time, then, we have lived with a certain tension: how do we live as distinctive individuals -- something we can't help but prize -- but still function as part of a collective? To put it more simply, how do we relate to non-familial others as others and not some extension of our selves? Western civilization has provided all sorts of wonderful terms to help with this -- neighbor, for example -- or, fellow citizen -- in academia or some professions the word colleague is very useful. All these terms help define and clarify healthy and productive relationships.
These generally positive terms, however, have something of a "dark" side because they mark a boundary between the most intimate and difficult to achieve (and thus most desirable) relationship between individuals: friendship. True friends are hard to come by. Most adults, if lucky, tend to count them on one hand. It is, in many respects, a mark of adulthood. As a jr. high kid or even as a college student we believed we had thousands of "friends." It is only later that we realize we need other terms for most of those relationships just as Facebook needs different layers of privacy.
This is, in part, what Montaigne was getting at when he said "Oh friends there are no friends." We address each other as such, we want more friendships certainly, but we realize the difficulty and rarity of such relationships. This is particularly true in the modern world where the onus is on the individual to care exclusively for himself or herself and his or her family. Who has time to really build a friendship? We had time when we kids and thus many of our "friends" our childhood friends.
And there is a certain melancholy sadness to this, of course. The pain of discovering someone you thought was a friend is not a friend is excruciating. Such is life.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kj1Cy3YtK9w
But it is for that reason we should learn to celebrate the more achievable kinds of positive relationships: as I get older I appreciate more and more those who are good citizens. They volunteer and serve on boards and treat me well. I love my neighbors who don't impinge on my privacy and are civil. Good colleagues at work who do their jobs without blurring boundaries are a treasure. Correspondingly, as I get older I work harder and harder to be good neighbor, a good citizen, and a good colleague.
I am, in fact, re-learning lessons I learned long ago -- and then abandoned in young adulthood -- about how to be a good teammate -- another very useful term and concept. Had I paid more attention to my understanding of being a teammate and honoring what that meant I would have saved myself a lot of time.
No comments:
Post a Comment