It is good to have friends
Friendship is strikingly different from many of our other relationships. Those are, to use a simple word, economic. In contrast, a friendship is a perpetual gift.
I recommend listening to this while reading; I listened while writing, and I liked how they came together.
Yesterday, I started my day with a swim. Barton Springs is a beautiful public swimming pool here in Austin, fed by an underground spring. On a warm day – and here in Austin, September is still warm – the water is bracing.
I’ve only gone a few times, but recently I was invited to join some friends on their weekly swim at Barton Springs. Two of them, R. and B. (I withold their names for privacy), have gone every week for twelve years.
There’s a routine to the swim: one or two big laps, a rendezvous in the shallow end to rest, maybe a jump from the diving board to end the day. It is a little liturgy, one accompanied by its own mythos; it is packed full of meaning.
I loved it. I’ll be going every week.
I ended my day on my back porch, sipping whiskey and eating tortilla chips dipped in H-E-B guacamole. Those same men were around a table with me. We drank a little bit of Austin 101 whiskey, which I had never had before, and celebrated. I have made progress on some projects, and we wanted to take the time to share some joy.
It wasn’t a party; the whole thing lasted about two hours. We didn’t drink much, but we talked and laughed a lot. We shared dreams, hopes, disappointments — and, as all friends do, we told many stories. My wife came back from her regular choir rehearsal and joined us, and then we talked about music.
As they left and I put our glasses in the dishwasher, I began to think about friendship. ‘It is good to have friends,’ I thought to myself. It is a banality; no one would disagree. By titling this essay, ‘It is good to have friends’ I am likely shooting myself in the foot; this is bad clickbait.
Yet, that night and this morning, I can’t think of much else.
Musonius Rufus, the great Stoic teacher of Epictetus, taught his students that it was good to have brothers; it was so good, in fact, that parents should strive to have more children rather than leaving their children wealth:
For my part I consider the man most enviable who lives amid a number of like-minded brothers, and I consider most beloved of the gods the man who has these blessings at home. Therefore I believe that each one of us ought to try to leave brothers rather than money to our children so as to leave greater assurances of blessings.
When he wants to justify this, he draws an analogy between brothers and friends. Strikingly, he does not need to justify having friends: ‘I need not argue that a man with many friends is more powerful than one who has no friends,’ he writes before continuing his argument. It was obvious to him that having friends was a good, and so he could prove having brothers or sons (or sisters or daughters, I would add) was good by showing their similarities.
Musonius Rufus does not give a theory of friendship in his writings; for that, we have to look back in history and turn to Aristotle.
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