Extracts
On Friendship
Selected from the Spring 2021 issue of Lapham's Quarterly.
Friendship is a mysterious and ocean-bottom thing. Who can know the outer ranges of it? Perhaps no human being has ever explored its limits.
—Zora Neale Hurston, 1942
The bird, a nest; the spider, a web; man, friendship.
—William Blake, c. 1790
Friendship at its most elevated—unselfish, thoughtful, egalitarian—should ideally serve as the model for a larger social good, as a standard of how we, as a society, ought to treat one another. If we were to see every suffering as the suffering of a friend, every loss, every deprivation and injustice as something befalling a friend, wouldn’t that radically rearrange—and humanize—the social order? So far it hasn’t happened; likely we will never know.
—Francine Prose, 2021
Perfect friendship is the friendship of men who are good and alike in virtue; for these wish well alike to each other qua good, and they are good…
