We learn about friendliness that it does not abolish the distance between human beings but brings that distance to life.
Don’t you know that “No” is the wildest word we consign to Language?
PART IV
Like many people, I’m used to thinking about relationships according to the common question “Are you close?” But I’ve come to see that the better question is about how two people best animate the space between them—how they maintain the élan of curiosity and surprise alongside familiarity and faith.
I didn’t go looking for distance in pairs; among the recurring qualities I found, it surprised me the most. But it struck me over and over again that without separation, there can be no relation. Once we’ve seen creative pairs connect, achieve confluence, and take positions in an ongoing dialectic, the question is how they remain absorbed in a shared endeavor not despite but because of ample room to move.
As an emblem of ideal distance—a distilled and pure illustration—consider this picture: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre working in the same café at separate tables. This was just one sign of a relationship built on unanimity of purpose and fueled by individual liberty. Sartre called the model of relationship “federative,” suggesting a shared philosophy as a central government with autonomy for the provinces over their internal affairs. Both he and Beauvoir accumulated disparate experiences, wrote separate stories and lectures, nurtured individual interests. Both had other lovers, full-blown affairs, even live-in partners. At one point, Sartre was sleeping with Evelyne Rey, the sister of the editor Claude Lanzmann, who was living with (and sleeping with) Beauvoir. Yet Lanzmann said there was never “the slightest question of rivalry with Sartre.” After mornings on her own—Sartre, too, gave his mornings to writing—Beauvoir went to him in the afternoon. As they viewed it, their style of connection enacted a feedback loop where distance served the mutual project, which project magnified their autonomy. It fit with their existentialist belief that, as the philosopher David Banach writes, human beings “are all ultimately alone, isolated islands of subjectivity in an objective world.” Yet the vision was not grim-faced and dour but breathless and excited.
Independence seeds interdependence—and vice versa. This was their creed, and Beauvoir wrote a kind of manifesto: “One single aim fired us, the urge to embrace all experience, and to bear witness concerning it. At times this meant that we had to follow diverse paths—though without concealing even the least of our discoveries from one another. When we were together we bent our wills so firmly to the requirements of this common task that even at the moment of parting we still thought as one. That which bound us freed us; and in this freedom we found ourselves bound as closely as possible.”