Friendship

                                                                   

I am reading a great book; A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara.  Not and easy book to read but a book that is moving steadily to the top of the list of the best books I have read so far. It has been again recommended by the husband of my best friend Basia. Knausgaard’s My Struggle was another one of his recommendations and that book for a while turned into a fascination for me.  I still have two last parts of My Struggle to read. It will come eventually.

                                                                             

For now, my full attention is with A Little Life. Apparently, the book and its author were one of the attractions of this year’s Writers Festival in Sydney. The book was short listed for the Man Booker Prize.  The next year I would like to pay more attention to this literary event. But maybe I will be in Poland then, it is a May event? Both are exciting alternatives so I will not lose whatever I’ll choose. 

The story is about four young men who meet when still in college and then move to New York. Their friendship continues for many years. It is another bildungsroman, like My Struggle. The boys grow into men and all of them are very successful professionally, exceptionally successful, really. They share a very loving and giving friendships. I am not sure if such idyllic relationships exist in real life and last not for such a long time as theirs. The author calls her novel a mix of fairytale and contemporary naturalistic prose. Even if we think that such a friendship is unrealistic and we file it into a fairytale category, it still expresses a human longing for this ideal friendship and trust. We need it to deal with a loneliness of human condition. Wow, I may have gone too far in my homemade philosophizing.

As I am almost half through the book the foursome is shaken already, but the book leaves a feeling that in a case of a real need the men would put all their resources together and rally to rescue if one of them was in trouble. Security coming out of such friendship is overwhelming. The situation may not be realistic but we dream of experiencing something that beautiful. It always has been my dream. Even if it is not likely that I will experience such an unconditional and deep friendship, it is good to have such aspirations and ideals even if it may never happen. The idea is very appealing.

Most valuable and longest lasting friendships usually start early in life. In childhood, or at school or at uni. Friendships starting in younger years often belong to the special category of friends “for life”.  According to a saying in addition to friendships "for life" there are also friendships “for a reason” and “for a season”. I had a number of such friendships and it was always very difficult to accept the fact that some of them had to end. I would think for a long time about why a friendship has finished, was I at fault, could it be resurrected… I found a statement in the book “He has never done it before, and so he had no real understanding of how slow, and sad, and difficult it was to end a friendship.” I have done it before, and it has happened to me before, but each time it was slow, sad and difficult. These days, I do not struggle that much to revive friendships that ran their cause and have completed, but I still am sad when a friendship has to finish and I wish it had been different.