An Ode to Friendship

What is friendship? Is it a binding obligation that prolonged companionship confers on one, an obligation to care for, to look out for each other, or is it something that you feel within your heart every waking moment? Does one have to feel duty-bound to respond to the call of a 'friend', or do we leave that to the vagaries of emotion and feelings? Does the string by which friends become one soul inhabiting two bodies, to quote Aristotle, come about by design, by desire, or by the sheer will of the Fates? And if the sundering of the soul from the body after death is described as a torment, then if friends should quarrel, does that sundering, albeit temporary, also cause for similar terror and anguish?

We are told that people everywhere ought to be the same, or that they ought to think alike, and have similar frailties, weaknesses, biases, prejudices, beliefs, desires and aspirations? While a voracious appetite for books may compensate for a life spent in a single country and surroundings, it cannot compensate for the reality that you cannot hope to understand a people merely by the descriptions in tomes. While it is equally true that you could live your entire life with your own people, and yet not hope to grasp everything and every facet of who they really are, it is perhaps a hundredfold, maybe a thousand-fold, more difficult to understand a people different from your own. For it is difficult to understand what offends, what pleases, what amazes, what is held dear and cherished, until you can understand how their heart beats.

And yet when one comes to a foreign land, it is not unheard of for one to find friends who seem like they have always been by one's side, though happiness and grief. There is no hesitation, no derision, no jaundiced vision; just a simple connection between the heart. What drives or inspires such a connection? How can someone who barely knows you, and who you barely know, become so indispensable to your daily routine, without talking to whom a day seems incomplete and bare? Truly, what Pascal says of love is equally true, perhaps many times over, of friendship, that the heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of.

It is so easy to say that friendship is a social compact, a convenience; one hears of concepts such as 'friends with benefits', and it bewilders me. To suggest that friendship in itself does not benefit the soul, that it, by itself, does not enrich one's existence, that there have been 'benefits' that hitherto have been absent in friendships, is to cheapen what has been held so dear and true of the relationship for ages. And yet maybe it is convenient for me, in my ivory tower, to look down upon this change, this 'progress' in what can be encompassed in the word 'friendship'. It is a confusing change, but one thing I hold true; friendship will endure as the sole relationship whose value in our lives will never diminish, for without a friend, are we not incomplete, a body without a soul, like a lonely leaf on the bough waiting for the winter to come and free it from its torment?