Bear and Bunny
If the adults in your life are like mine were—and
I suspect that in this matter most parents or guardians are quite similar—you
will someday find that they have kept stuck in a box someplace or on a shelf at
the back of a closet somewhere any number of relics from by-then-forgotten episodes
of your childhood. And when I say forgotten episodes, I mean forgotten by you: for your parents will surely have
remembered them, even without looking back at the objects they’ve so carefully
preserved.
So, as I say, at some point you will find these
things. It might be anything, from baby shoes to your first tooth to a blue
ribbon from a first grade science fair. One guy I knew in St. Louis kept his
sons’ tonsils in a glass jar in a kitchen cupboard, but I assume he was a
statistical outlier.
As you will have inferred, I am speaking from
experience here. Indeed, I am speaking in a certain sense from triple
experience, since I inherited one of these treasure troves from my grandmother
and one from a doting great-aunt as well as the expected pile of things from my
parents. But it’s that last collection, my parents’ own archive, that I have
particularly in mind this morning: and especially out of that collection I have
been thinking about these two carefully preserved relics from the Eisenhower
administration.
[[Here, I produced two stuffed animals from my childhood:]]
I was apparently not a wildly creative child, at least in the
early stages, and these two rediscovered old friends are simply named “Bear”
and “Bunny.” I’ve brought them along because I want to talk about friendship,
and particularly about friendships of our youth, friendships that, like Bear
and Bunny, we may even lose track of for years at a time. I want to talk about
these friendships particularly this morning because, while my parents could
stuff these imaginary companions away in a box for me to discover later, no one
can save our real relationships for us, no one can wrap them up in tissue paper
until we want them later. That’s work we have to do for ourselves; it’s one of
the first challenges of this process of adulting that you all are about to
begin.
I have a psychologist friend—someone whom I’ve actually
known since high school—who argues that for various technical psychological
reasons the friends we make in our youth—our “first friends,” as he calls
them—are qualitatively different from the friends we acquire later in life. And
this is all the more the case when we make these friends in the relatively
enclosed atmosphere of a boarding school, where our experiences are just that
much more intense, sometimes by accident and sometimes by design. People who
study these things say that sharing intense experiences—like battle or boot
camp—produces a relationship they call “camaraderie.” Camaraderie doesn’t
necessarily overlap with friendship: one article I read recently described the
camaraderie between black marines and another member of their platoon who
brought his Ku Klux Klan robes with him to basic training. But when camaraderie
does coincide with friendship, and
particularly when it overlaps with the uniquely powerful form of “first friendship,” it forms personal
bonds that can seem incomprehensible to people who haven’t had the experience
themselves.
School people have been saying this sort of thing
for centuries, of course: here at The Hill, we talk, with a certain degree of
exaggeration, about “ties that will never sever,” but I bet that a little bit
of research at almost any other school would turn up something of the same
sort. All these sentimental things are clichés, of course, but sometimes things
are clichés precisely because they reflect deep-seated realities, inescapable
workings of our minds and our hearts. I’m not saying, of course, that each of
you has been, or will be, best friends with everyone else sitting in this room:
schoolboy enemies are also a cliché, after all, and probably an equally valid
one. There are, I admit, people I didn’t like fifty years ago at Culver that I
probably wouldn’t like if I saw them again this morning as I walked out of the
chapel—but I wish it weren’t so, and I certainly don’t think any of us need to
be encouraged to hold grudges: that happens all too often without any help from
me.
I do want to encourage you, though, to hold fast
to these friends that you do see around you. I’m thinking, here, particularly,
about what we might call the middle-term. In the really long term, looking ahead fifty years as I was just looking
back, you won’t have any trouble appreciating the value of these friends you’re
making now, if you do manage to keep them: half a century hence, you may
have trouble recognizing them when
you see them at reunions, but you’ll know very well how important they are to
you, or, in the case of those who will have died, how important they were. Time
will teach that lesson well enough.
On the other hand, in the really short term, you
don’t need encouragement, either—the sentiments of this moment will, generally,
carry you through. A couple of hours from now, with your clothes dripping
pond-water and hearts dripping affection, and not a few eyes dripping tears, you
will be hugging everyone who stands still long enough to fall into your cold
and clammy embraces. [[The new graduates' jumping into the campus pond, called, perversely enough, "The Dell," is the customary conclusion of The Hill's commencement exercises.]] There’s not much need for positive reinforcement there,
either.
In the middle range, though, most friendships,
even these first-friendships with their deep and wide-spread roots, will
benefit from some cultivation. The most obvious thing to say about that cultivation
is that you should stay in touch; and that’s fair enough advice, even for you
all, who are perhaps the most well-connected generation since people lived in
villages so small that they thought marrying their second cousin was a wild and
crazy way of bringing new blood into the family. But, honestly, while staying
in touch is good and helpful, it’s not vital. One of the things people most
often comment about their deepest friendships is that when they get back
together again after a long separation, they can pick up their conversations
right where they left off. So, being in touch, while obvious, isn’t absolutely
necessary.
What is
necessary, I suspect, is lowered expectations, at least in a practical
sense. I’m putting it that way to be provocative, of course, but I do want to get at a serious point. One
of my ethics students reminded me last year of a classic distinction between
various kinds of friends: there are useful friends, pleasant friends, and then
finally true friends, friends properly so-called. The fundamental difference
between true friends and the other two kinds is that true friends are friends simply for their own sake. That is to
say, when we have useful friends, the
good will between us and them is based on the fact that there is something we
can do for them and something they can do for us: that’s genuine good will, as far as it goes, but when the underlying
transaction is finished, the friendship tends to fade away. And the same sort
of thing is true with pleasant
friends, except that the transaction is emotional, not physical or economic: we
can exchange a genuine good will with people when we make each other happy,
but, again, if making each other happy is all there is to it, the friendship
will tend to go away when we stop finding each other clever or cheerful or
attractive or amusing.
So when I advise you, for the middle term, to
have low practical expectations of your Hill ties, what I mean is this:
don’t reduce the true friendships you have made here to merely transactional
ones: don’t drag these people you have known so well at such a crucial time in
your lives down to the level of the merely useful and pleasant. That’s not to
say that you may not, over the years, be able to help a friend out in some
useful way—I have rented my house back in Culver to an old school friend on
just a handshake for the last thirteen years, and couldn’t have asked for a
better tenant, while the publisher of my two novels is a friend from both high
school and college (which is the only reason they got published at all). So a
true friendship may at some point turn out also
to be useful: but if you expect it to
be, you’re very much liable to reduce it to mere
usefulness, and then to lose it when that moment of usefulness passes. And the
same is true, of course, with respect to pleasure: true friends often entertain
us and make us happy to be around them, but if we try to make the interchange
of pleasure the basis of friendship,
we risk losing—indeed, we almost certainly will
lose—the true friendship that not only entertains us but also consoles us in
our grief, celebrates our joys, and stands silently with us when we can’t bear
anything other than the mere presence of another.
So, don’t expect utility, and don’t demand
pleasure, from these first friendships that you have formed: welcome those things
when you happen to get them over the decades, but don’t mistake them for the
higher values of your unseverable ties. The goodwill between true friends is
based, not on usefulness nor on pleasure, but on an appreciation for what is
permanently, ultimately, good in each other: that’s what makes these
friendships enduring.
Now, I have to consider at least one possible
objection to what I’ve been saying: or, rather, an objection to my having said
it. After my talk to the whole school earlier this spring on Lorenzo the
Magnificent, someone got in touch with me to say that the talk was all right,
but that I surely should have spent at least some of my time talking about the life of the mind. My
correspondent argued that as someone with a decent education and an active
career as a scholar, speaking, after all, in a school, I had missed a chance to
commend the intellectual life to our community, ignoring the opportunity to
remind us all of our place in an academic tradition that runs all the way back
to Socrates meeting with his students in the Athenian grove of Academe.
And I suppose these remarks this morning are
subject to that same criticism, that I have been talking too much about
friendship and not enough about wisdom. Though, in my defense, I could quote
Cicero, who wrote in his dialogue “On Friendship” that friendship is the second
most important thing after Wisdom itself. He said:
For friendship is nothing else than an accord in
all things, human and divine, conjoined with mutual goodwill and affection, and
I am inclined to think that, with the exception of wisdom, no better thing has
been given to humanity by the immortal gods.[1]
And,
in fact, Cicero goes on to clarify that even wisdom is not better than
friendship in some vague and general way:
rather, wisdom is specifically
better, precisely because we need wisdom to manage
friendship. Obviously, evil people can, and often do, take advantage of
their friends, but even good people will sometimes, with the best of
intentions, ask friends things with which the friends ought not to agree. For
example, in Robert Bolt’s play A Man for
All Seasons, set in the time of King Henry the Eighth, the Duke of Norfolk
tries to convince the central character, the famously wise Sir Thomas More, to
sign a document approving of King Henry’s divorce and remarriage. Norfolk says,
I don't know if the marriage was lawful or not . .
. but damn it, Thomas, look at these names. Why can't you do as I did and come
with us for fellowship?
To which More replies:
And when we die, and you are sent to heaven for
doing your conscience. . . and I am sent to hell for not doing mine, will you
come with me, for fellowship?
Fellowship,
or friendship, Bolt tells us, is no reason to disobey conscience, which is the
moral aspect of wisdom: Like Cicero, Bolt says that it is the job of wisdom to
restrain us when goodwill might otherwise drive us to folly.
So, yes, certainly, by all means, embrace the
life of the mind, whether as scholars or simply as educated, curious, and
humane citizens of your several nations and of the ever-more-closely tied
together world. As the fourth chapter of the Book of Proverbs in the Hebrew
Bible says, personifying Wisdom as God’s female agent in Creation:
7. Get wisdom,
and whatever else you get, get insight.
8. Prize her highly, and she will exalt you;
she will honor you if you embrace her.
9. She will place on your head a fair garland;
she will bestow on you a beautiful crown.
and whatever else you get, get insight.
8. Prize her highly, and she will exalt you;
she will honor you if you embrace her.
9. She will place on your head a fair garland;
she will bestow on you a beautiful crown.
Or,
as our reading from the Gita this morning said, “Understand that which
is to be known by respecting the wise and by asking proper questions”; or,
again, as St. Paul put it, direct your minds toward whatsoever things are true,
honorable, just, pure, pleasing, commendable, excellent, and worthy of praise.
But as you live out those rich, true, excellent intellectual
lives, remember, too, this piece of advice from the sixth chapter of the
apocryphal book of the Bible called Ecclesiasticus, also known as “The Wisdom
of Sirach”:
14. Faithful friends are a sturdy shelter:
whoever
finds one has found a treasure.
15. Faithful friends are beyond price;
no
amount can balance their worth.
16. Faithful friends are life-saving medicine;
and
those who fear the Lord will find them.
The
people sitting here with you today, I would suggest, are a shelter you already
inhabit, a treasure you have already found, a medicine you have stored up
against future need. The challenge is to keep them until, fifty years or more
from now, you come back here, as worn and unrecognizable as Bear and Bunny, and
sit down, perhaps even in these very pews, to be astonished all over again by
the ties that bind you to these comrades and first friends.
---The Very Rev. John Wm.
Houghton, Ph.D.,
Dean of the Alumni Chapel
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