Always on Your Side
goodbye ain’t gone?” Isn’t friendship all in the doing? If I cannot take a walk with you and talk my way to the other side of the dilemma, I am not enacting friendship. If I cannot tell you every little thing when I am preparing dinner and you have poured me a glass of wine, how are you my friend?
Elizabeth Alexander • The Light of the World: A Memoir
At the end of April, in a powerful essay by another writer, Ottessa Moshfegh, I read this line about love: “Without it, life is just ‘doing time.’” I don’t think she intended by this only romantic love, or parental love, or familial love or really any kind of love in particular. At least, I read it in the Platonic sense: Love with a capital L, an i
... See moreZadie Smith • Intimations: Six Essays
Friendship as an inner fulcrum upon which all our actions can reliably hinge, a compass to offer us direction when we’re lost, and a shield to protect us.
Kate Johnson • Radical Friendship
Sometimes the Reason You Can’t Find People You Resonate With Is Because You Misread the Ones You Meet
Henrik Karlssonhenrikkarlsson.xyzSome social scientists and even philosophers suggest a different vision of friendship, in which friendship is conceived not as a ledger of emotional debits and credits but as an organic creation — an artwork — built by the friends themselves. Conceived in this way, friendships are not ranked or stratified along a bright line from BFF to near strang... See more
Lisa Miller • The Vexing Problem of the ‘Medium Friend’
We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life. What I’m grateful and thankful to have found at Yale, and what I’m scared of losing when we wake up tomorrow and leave this place.
It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of
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