July 24, 2006

Dear Colleague,

    Note that I do not say, "Dear Friend." If I do, you may well ask, "What is that?" so out of fashion has friendship become. As Wayne Booth observes, "After millennia during which friendship was one of the major philosophical topics, the subject of thousands of books and tens of thousands of essays, it has now so dwindled that our encyclopedias do not even mention it." What has taken its place? Well, family values are as strong as ever: indeed, they are valued to the point of idolatry. Comradeship flourished under Communism, and perhaps for that reason it is no longer much in use. Comradeship remains, however, an important relationship, especially in the army. It differs from friendship in that it is not an exploration of the world. Rather it is the opposite, for comradeship depends on adhering rigidly to a small set of passionately shared values, such as those of obedience and loyalty, both of which say, in essence, "Do not look beyond." Most importantly, we live in a world of mutual back-scratching: you give me this and I will give you that, you do this for me and I will do that for you. Of course, such a relationship has always existed: traders and politicians do it all the time. Only now it has spread to all areas of life, displacing what was formerly comradeship, friendship, and collegiality. Nowadays, the only people who address me as "Dear Yi-Fu" in their correspondence and who scatter my first name liberally throughout their letter are people who want me to buy something, or to vote for a certain candidate.

    Friendship does not call for reciprocity. That's one of its unique features. Yet, since it occurs between humans, some kind of reciprocity is--in the long run--expected. Otherwise, it would not be friendship, but patronage. Patronage elicits gratitude. Friendship, since it never goes overboard in one-sided giving, elicits affection. Take the example of correspondence. When I write to a friend, it would be absurd to say that I don't expect a letter in return. By writing, I make myself vulnerable. I wait and, after a couple of weeks, tell myself not be too impatient, but this is hard to do: the empty mailbox in time becomes a magnavox of rejection. Keats, the poet, was attuned to this issue when he began a letter to his friend, Bailey, in the autumn of 1817. While he was writing the letter, which was overdue, another letter arrived from Bailey, and Keats responded immediately:

I am glad that I have been neglectful.. therefrom I have received proof of your utmost kindness which at present I feel very much--and I wish I had a heart always open to such sensations--but there is no altering a Man's nature and mine must be radically wrong for it will lie dormant a whole month.

    Keats was saying that his neglect was caused by indolence, his nature, and should not therefore be taken personally. Moreover, his neglect unintentionally gave him assurance of Bailey's generosity and friendship, which he was able to feel more keenly than ever. In short, friendship does require reciprocity, but one of subtle nature: it must not deteriorate into mutual back-scratching, nor transmute into one of largesse and gratitude. Friendship, real friendship, is inherently tense and potentially tragic. It is not everyone's (certainly not America's) cup of tea. So Keats offers something else--"pastoral friendship" to correspond with "cold pastoral" in poetry. Cold pastoral gives transient pleasure, a cool breeze on a hot day. That's something, too, isn't it? Like social chitchat over half a BLT sandwich at the University Club?

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu

P. S. I am ashamed to write on this inconsequential topic when Israel is raining bombs on Lebanon, killing many civilians, necessitating mass burial. The whole world says, "Stop! Stop!" But we say, no, let the bombing and the killing continue.