Not that I didn't enjoy the book. In fact, I was overjoyed to hear that my favorite essayist had written a book on friendship, a frequent topic on this blog, and while the writing was more lifeless than I've come to expect from Epstein and some chapters could be excised altogether, there were plenty of great observations.
Epstein, clearly an extrovert, lays claim to a ridiculous amount of friends, upwards of fifty as opposed to my dozen or so. This is partially because (and this is an important part of his thesis) his concept of friendship has nothing to do with the "confessing" we've come to expect from modern friendships.
As a very private person (Dan wrote on his weblog) I'm sympathetic to this view. I think of my younger brother, who goes fishing several times a week with a friend of his but apparently doesn't discuss anything of import. Aren't these two friends, good friends in fact? I have several good friends who've never come to me with their problems — am I supposed to resent them for that?
How much I'm willing to open up to a friend does play a factor in how good of friend I consider them to be, but it's far from the only factor. After reading Friendship I find myself weighing and measuring more: Epstein compares friendship to "the seating plan in a stadium, with my closest friends seated in the box seats, less close friends in the grandstand, and business associates and acquaintances in the bleachers" (19).
For years now, I've been too binary, trying to fill the box seats and the bleachers but neglecting the grandstand. Figuring who goes there is easy, since Epstein provides a spot-on definition of "acquaintance":
An acquaintance, I should say, is someone you know, may even have known for a long while, but almost never plan to meet, unless for some very specific reason. He or she may be someone pleasing enough to encounter — on the street, at a party or professional function, even in a hospital — but one generally does so with a slight element of surprise. A relationship with an acquaintance does not postulate a future. You may or may not meet again, no obligation on either side, nothing owed but recognition and civility. You may dislike, in fact despise, an acquaintance, and do so with a clear conscience, something one is not permitted to do with a person one claims to call a friend. (2)
That was for you, Ann of Stillwater. I have some fantastic acquaintances.
Down in the pricier seats, Epstein provides two more useful definitions:
The sociologists nowadays speak of "fossil friends" to refer to friends from one's geological past, from college, or high school days, or earlier, whom one can go without seeing for years and then pick up with roughly where you both left off. (71-72)
Dylan, of course, is my prototypical "fossil friend," and since I'm slow/cautious/paranoid about making friends, not to mention just out of college, I have more of this type of friend than any other.
More useful is the "foxhole friend" (37-38), the person you'd like to have in your corner when the going gets tough. We were erroneously taught in high school that this is how Germans view friendship, so for years I've divided the people I like into acquaintances and freunds, with often disastrous results. Good people were snubbed, box seats were trashed.
As Epstein points out, foxhole friends needn't be your closest friends — you may have witty and interesting friends who aren't loyal, trustworthy, or reliable — but I for one have given all these friends complementary box seats.
I remember one night at Lawrence when a good acquaintance suddenly, inexplicably stood up for me when everyone else was keeping quiet or piling on. (Some people, dimmer bulbs all, take my self-deprecating humor as an "opening," as if I'm not aware of my faults and have exposed them unwittingly.) It was completely unnecessary, no one else at Lawrence had ever done such a thing, and yet: instant foxhole friend.
This is the kind of friend I try to be, to the extent that a disorganized procrastinist can be relied upon at all.
Epstein describes many more types of friendship, and it's as a taxonomy that this book is most useful. I now know that I've been too stingy, too mired in dichotomies. This book has shaken my long-held beliefs about friendship. Whether it will affect my actual relationships remains to be seen.
