June 5, 2008

Friendship

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Modern Library essays edition, paperback

5 cards

This is the next essay for my reading group. Emerson of course has brilliant insights into friendship even though in a sense he seems to unravel them a bit on page 212. For those in search of dreams and fables, armed with sublime hope.

Select lines:

201- "The world uncertain comes and goes, the lover rooted stays."

-"We have a great deal more kindness that is ever spoken."

202-203- "Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the universe it should rejoin its friend and it would be content and cheerful along for a thousand years."

203- "My friends have come to me unsought."

"A new person is to me a great event and hinders me from sleep."

204- "Shall I not be as real as the things I see?"

205- "Thus every man passes his life in the search after friendship and if he should record his true sentiment, he might write a letter like this to each new candidate for his love..."

207- truth and thinking aloud

209- "It should never fall into something usual and settled, but should be alert and inventive and add rhyme and reason to what was drudgery."

-"Two may talk and one may hear, but three cannot take part in a conversation of the most sincere and searching sort."

-"an absolute running of two souls into one."

210- "Among those who enjoy his thought he will regain his tongue."

-"Friendship requires that rare mean betwixt likeness and unlikeness..."

-"Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo."

-"Are you the friend of your friend's buttons, or of his thought?"

211- "The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be seen if the eye is too near. To my friend I write a letter and from him I receive a letter."

-"We must be our own before we can be another's"

-"... the only way to have a friend is to be one."

212- "We walk along in the world. Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables. But a sublime hope cheers ever the faithful heart....souls are not acting, enduring and daring, which can love us an we can love."

-"By persisting in your path, though you forfeit the little you gain the great."

213- "I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can fine them, but I seldom use them."

-"I will receive from them not what they have but what they are."

-"We will meet as though we met not and part as though we parted not."

214- "It is thought a disgrace to love unrequited. but the great will see that true love cannot be unrequited."

"The essence of friendship is entireness..."