The only way to have a friend is to be one…
Ralph Waldo Emerson
‘A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud…’ Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American philosopher and poet, wrote in 1841 in his essay ‘Friendship’. ‘The only way to have a friend is to be one’.
Here I am now, towards the end of my life, discovering this wisdom when I could have made great use of it so much earlier. At times we are all friendless or we think and believe that we are without friends. If we think and believe something like that, then that’s how it is.
Before coming to Australia I heard about the wonderful mateship that existed here. All men were mates. My first experience of mateship was between two taxi drivers in Sydney and it was through gritted teeth. And later, on another occasion, in a very busy intersection, two taxi drivers who did not speak much English (I thought they might be from Greece or Egypt) shouted at each other. Their voices, rising, seemed to be reaching a dangerous pitch. I crouched, hoping that the two men would, before coming to blows, be separated quickly as the traffic, unblocking, moved on.
‘He my mate he my brozzer,’ my cab driver explained as we resumed the journey. ‘He like know how my family – and I like know how his.’ He shrugged his shoulders and settled to wait in the next intersection.
People have more freedom, outwardly, in relationships at the present time. There are many different kinds of relationships, there is no need to list them here. If a friendship or a marriage comes to an end the people concerned are not looked down upon or treated as outcasts. Outwardly a ‘break up’ is more simple; inwardly it is just as painful as it always was, with the same complications of guilt, resentment, shock, heartache and those bleak times of sorrow and disappointment – and, of course, concern for the wellbeing of those innocently involved.
Since the earliest times human beings have hurt themselves and each other by not knowing how to be a friend, a partner, a lover or a beloved. Being rejected is one of the most difficult realisations to accept. The pain of hurting someone and of being hurt has persisted through the ages. It is material for the novelist, the poet and the dramatist, from the ancient Greeks (for example, Euripides’ Medea and Electra) to the present time.
‘The only way to have a friend is to be one.’ How important it is to know this! In the 1990s, more than ever, friends are necessary. Computers, mobile phones, televisions, dishwashers and automatic teller machines are very useful, but they are not people being friends. Each one is like an acquaintance, nice to have and very useful. An acquaintance should not be confused with a friend. Friendship, like love, has to be sincere. It requires complete trust between the people concerned and it requires the ability to give and to accept without reservation. Friends have the power to find, together, a philosophy that can make human life endurable. And, as Bertrand Russell writes in his autobiography, ‘In human relations one should penetrate to the core of loneliness in each person and speak to that…’.
There is an excitement in the discovery that a particular person is in fact a friend.
To feel friendless is very unpleasant but to be the person who is making someone feel excluded and friendless is even more unpleasant. This fact has often to be discovered through an experience seen in retrospect. The regret following closely on the event is often inexplicable at the time but, looking back, our sense of shame is increased.
The journey to school is always, it seems, at dusk… This first journey is in the autumn when the afternoons are dark before four o’clock. The melancholy railway crawls through waterlogged meadows where mourning willow trees follow the winding streams. Cattle, knee deep in damp grass, raise their heads as if in an understanding of sorrow as the slow train passes. The roads at the level crossings are deserted. No one waits to wave and curtains of drab colours are pulled across the dimly lit cottage windows…
This passage from my novel My Father’s Moon is a metaphor showing the loneliness of the character, Vera, during her first uneasy journey to boarding school. It is a prelude to a scene of cruel mental and physical teasing in which Vera does not attempt to comfort the victim. She even denies knowing the victim, saying she is not her friend. She follows this by stealing the hot bath and the hot milk intended for the badly bruised and bleeding victim. Subsequently Vera suffers by being haunted by her own behaviour and by the recurring image of the victim’s crouched and shaking shoulders, which are denied any caring and kindly arms.
In writing, with hindsight, from half-remembered childhood experience, it is possible to come to an understanding which was previously unthought of, unrealised.
When I am working – that is, writing – I do not feel lonely or friendless. The characters are not my friends, not at all, but the explorations I make into their lives, their thoughts, wishes and feelings keep me close, always, to human needs, to the fears, the hopes, the wishes and the actions. Close to something that resembles friendship in its intimacy.
We live in times of change. In Australia, as in other countries, we are in a time that, later, might be described as a renaissance; a time that might later be compared with the Renaissance now described as the golden age of creativity and change, a revival of art and letters influenced by the classical models of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. There were then many writers whose work has been preserved and is in an available form for the present-day reader. Among the many names are: Cervantes, Don Quixote and the Gold Age (1605); Montaigne, The Old World and the New (1588); Albrecht Dürer, A Painter’s Travels (1520); and Francis Bacon, Henry VII: A New Monarch (1622) to name a few.
Sometimes, unexpectedly, it is possible to meet a friend where no such person exists at the present time, except within the pages of a book. As in a novel containing examples of real life made readable in imaginative and fluent prose, a friend may well be found in the personal writings of essays and autobiography. Among the many friends to be found from the golden age of literature and art there is Girolamo Cardano (1501–1576) an Italian mathematician, physician, astrologer and encyclopaedia writer. He wrote a personal essay on Himself. This description immediately draws the reader, with affection and sympathy, close to him. He writes about his medium height, going down at once to his feet, which are ‘short and wide near the toes and rather high at the heels’. He can never find well-fitting shoes and has to have them made. His head is too small and slopes away at the back and no painter is able to make a good portrait of him. He describes his warts and a hard ball in his neck – not too conspicuous, an inheritance from his mother. He describes the foods he likes; honey, cane sugar, dried grapes, melons (after he learned of their medicinal properties). He finds olive oil delicious and garlic does him good. The lists are endless. The reader has the excitement of coming to know him. His illnesses are listed. He is afraid of high places and of mad dogs. Sometimes he is tormented by a tragic passion and plans then to suicide. It is his custom to remain in bed for ten hours – the essay includes his recipe for insomnia and his worrying over his sons. He suffers from congenital palpitations, haemorrhoids and gout. The most endearing quality, which makes him seem to be the kind of man who, having suffered, will have much sympathy for a friend, is that ‘I have discovered, by experience, that I cannot be long without bodily pain, for if once that circumstance arises, a certain mental anguish overcomes me, so grievous that nothing could be more distressing.’
The best part of having a friend within the pages of a book is that when his harsh, shrill voice and his fixed gaze, his indigestion and his cough, become too much for the reader, the book can either be closed, or opened to a different experience, a different friend – Albrecht Dürer, for example. Dürer kept a travel diary in which he recorded enormous meals, fine linen, china and silver, gracious houses and beautiful paintings – Van Eyck’s ‘Adoration of the Mystic Lamb’, to name one. He describes himself standing on a bridge ‘where men are beheaded’; there are two statues (1371) on the bridge as a reminder that there a son beheaded his father… To read these unselfconscious autobiographical details gives insight into the wisdom of acceptance of the self. Without examination, the wisdom of acceptance and tolerance, it is hardly possible to follow Emerson’s advice: ‘The only way to have a friend is to be one.’