Friends should make you better

Once found, treasure them, and don't let them go, for they may be taken from you all too soon.

"Friendship," writes the Dominican master A.G. Sertillanges in his little masterpiece The Intellectual Life, "is an obstetric art; it draws out our richest and deepest resources; it unfolds the wings of our dreams and hidden indeterminate thoughts; it serves as a check on our judgments, tries out our new ideas, keeps up our ardor, and inflames our enthusiasm."

Here is one of the best, though briefest, descriptions of friendship I’ve ever come across.

Reading it the other day made me think in gratitude of the many good friends that I have had, and have. Friends with whom an evening's conversation flies past as if in a matter of moments. From whose company I always come away having learned something new, or seen something old in a new light, and challenged (whether overtly, or by the light of example) to do better: to be a better husband, father, colleague, thinker, citizen and friend.

Though I wrote at length about friendship in my obituary for Will, I only scratched the surface. If I were to summarize what Will did for me as a friend, I could put it no better than how Sertillanges puts it above. In moments when my enthusiasm flagged, when I was mired in the morass of my own heavy nature, overcome by ennui or a lack of imagination or perspective, I need only drop by his office for a pot of tea, or give him a call. Inevitably I emerged fired up, refreshed, my mind re-opened to the things about which, in my best moments, I care the most.

Will always had some new passion. Some new language he was studying, or author he was devouring, or big idea he was exploring, or project on the go. Not in the way of a dilettante. But rather in the way of a Renaissance man. Utterly immersing himself in it. Building, making, doing, writing.

There was something life-giving in listening to Will explain, for instance, the virtues of various types and mixes of grass: what each grass contributes to the ecosystem of a meadow or pasture; the diverse shapes and depths of their roots; how they stem the tide of erosion; what nutrients they fix in the earth and provide to livestock; their particular aesthetic features: shape, shade and size. It was the effortless and utterly sincere ardor of his interest that made me realize that, yes, I too want to have such a mind as to see very grass beneath my feet as something supremely worthy of my undivided attention.

The last time I saw Will, we went for a long walk in the woods. For the first hour or so, Will explained to me his vision for a water filtration system on his farm, in which he hoped to filter the water through a series of barrels filled with progressively finer stuff (stones, gravel, sand, charcoal), forced through with an electricity-free ram pump. Cheap, effective, energy-independent. I knew full well that he would almost certainly never have the time or energy, in the short days remaining to him, to fulfill this project. But the enthusiasm with which he explained it, both the theory and the practical details, was the enthusiasm on which I fed for so many years.

It is easy, I suppose, to fall into the temptation of the jeremiad, and to lament that this "modern world" of ours does not understand friendship. And yet, I suppose I have enough of Jeremiah in me to give in ever so little to the temptation. Too much of what passes for friendship now seems to be little more than the mutual passing of time. There is, of course, nothing at all wrong with getting together with friends to drink and watch the game. But if that is the extent of the friendship, then what is it really worth?

Certainly, this is not the sort of friendship upon which the likes of Plato, Aristotle and Cicero waxed eloquent, speaking of it as among the very greatest treasures available in this life. “Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods,” wrote Aristotle in the Nichomachean Ethics. “There is nothing so precious as a faithful friend,” says Ben Sira in the book of Sirach, “and no scales can measure his excellence.”

Friends, to be worthy of the name, should, in the long run, make you better. They should, as Sertillanges notes, draw out your "richest and deepest resources". In their presence, and under their influence, you should be awakened to interests you didn't know you had, reminded of aspirations that you may have once formulated but forgotten in the fog of daily life, and instructed in ideas that expand your conceptual landscape. You should feel challenged, chastened, inspired, and invigorated.

Not all the time, of course. Sometimes, what is needed is nothing more than a beer and the game after a long week. But in general, over the course of a friendship, if all is going well, then in retrospect it should seem self-evident that you are not the same, but a better man or woman, precisely because of the friendship.

Friends like these can, I admit, be hard to find. But once found, treasure them, and don't let them go. For whatever you do, they may be taken from you all too soon.