I wonder what is so significant in an honest friend whose throwing away is equal to throwing away one’s life.
I feel spiritual comfort when I am in your company. I felt an emotional fillip to think about it.
Does friendship bring happiness to one’s life?
What sort of happiness, happiness of a child flying kites or happiness of a depressed person looking at sea?
What is friendship per se and what are those elements that create and then preserve a friendship?
These questions nag me continuously when I meet an honest friend.
There is also a girl from my class who I’ve noticed a long time ago but I am sharing ideas with her now, after years. I really can’t figure out what is my relationship with both of them. Both of them are lovely, beautiful and high-brow humans and I am greatly impressed by them. That girl is awesomely mature, thoughtful and a connoisseur of art. But, sometimes I feel, perhaps there is a gap in her, a huge gap that makes her reckon with this idea:
” I know that I have lost something but I am not sure what that is?”
-- another reading that stuck with me is:
https://www.middleeasteye.net/discover/arabic-language-love-degrees-crush-madness
There are therefore three kinds of friendship, equal in number to the things that are lovable. Now those who love each other for their utility do not love each other for themselves but in virtue of some good which they get from each other. So too with those who love for the sake of pleasure; it is not for their character that men love ready-witted people, but because they find them pleasant [aristotle]
“And thus these friendships are only incidental; for it is not as
being the man he is that the loved person is loved, but as providing
some good or pleasure. Such friendships, then, are easily dissolved, if
the parties do not remain like themselves; for if the one party is no
longer pleasant or useful, the other ceases to love him.”
There is nothing wrong with these kinds of friendships. But if they’re all we ever experience, two things will happen: 1) All of our relationships will eventually fade because our wants, needs, desires, and wishes keep changing until the day we die. 2) We’ll always crave something more — a deeper, more honest, more meaningful connection.
This deeper connection is the third kind of friendship that Aristotle described. He called it “perfect friendship:”
“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 themselves. Now those who wish well to their friends for their sake are most truly friends; for they do this by reason of own nature and not incidentally; therefore their friendship lasts as long as they are good-and goodness is an enduring thing.”
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