Monday, May 02, 2011

C.S. Lewis on Friendship


“I have no duty to be anyone's Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

"The common quest or vision which unites Friends does not absorb them in such a way that they remain ignorant or oblivious of one another. On the contrary it is the very medium in which their mutual love and knowledge exist...Every step of the common journey tests his metal; and the tests are tests we fully understand because we are undergoing them ourselves.

Hence, as he rings true time after time, our reliance, our respect and our admiration blossom into an Appreciative love of a singularly robust and well-informed kind. If, at the outset, we had attended more to him and less to the thing our Friendship is 'about,' we should not have come to know or love him so well. You will not find the warrior, the poet, the philosopher or the Christian by staring in his eyes as if he were your mistress: better fight beside him, read with him, argue with him, pray with him.

In a perfect Friendship this Appreciative love is, I think, often so great and so firmly based that each member of the circle feels in his secret heart, humbled before all the rest.

"Those are the golden sessions; when four or five of us after a hard day's walking have come to our inn; when our slippers are on, our feet spread out towards the blaze...when the whole world, and something beyond the world, opens itself to our minds as we talk..."

-C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves, 71-72