Do you want to be my friend?

We were gossiping about a luminary looking for a companion and the conversation turned to the nature of friendship ...

A friend can save you from your better self.

But notice that the crossing over from capability to action depends upon the friend: you may or may not be saved.

If you have a flair for conviviality and a penchant for charming acquaintances, your own better nature may be a talent for friendship. In which case, your best friend may be the one who declines to become your friend.

To tackle from another angle, let us quote Denise Riley quoting Merleau-Ponty from the Phenomenology of Perception

Nothing determines me from outside, not because nothing acts upon me, but, on the contrary, because I am from the start outside myself and open to the world.

Riley, attuned to liminal matters, places the quotation in an endnote and repeats it as the epigraph to a subsequent section of her book, The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony.

And so I can become and not become my own best friend and with some of my other friends I partake of the merriment of being giddy and dizzy for a long time but not forever. And "companion" is a lovely synonym since it betokens a journey, denotes company along the way.

Attributed to Charlie Chaplin: "A friend is a sun without sunset". That's a scorcher. I think I prefer companions. And the lingering pleasure of sunsets.

And so for day 1223
19.04.2010