Friendship
A few days ago, I came across a question on Quora, “Does your best friend keep changing as you grow up?” I seem to have been blessed (or cursed, for this is subjective) with a penchant for courtly language and grammar, and I forthwith responded as follows:
___________________________________________________________________
The phrasing of the question seems to me imprecise, for it could pose as such either with regard to me (does my best friend keep changing as I grow up?) or with regard to a general phenomenon (does one’s best friend keep changing as one grows up?). I must express my categorical displeasure at, as I perceive it, such erosion of the English language. Since the meaning is not clear, I shall address both variants.
The answer with regard to me, thus far, is negative. For fifteen years now, I have had one best friend. In childhood, as is inevitable, we had too many fights, but we always reconciled. All of them feel in retrospect dreadfully silly. He now pursues his education in the United States, and we happen periodically to exchange letters typed in MS Word, besides our daily WhatsApp conversations; the latter concerned never with mundane inquiries of well-being but an exchange of interesting articles and perfunctory deliberations on such topics as may interest us.
Much as we should like to, we cannot bask in daily discussions in physical proximity on our respective writings, such as they are, as once did the authors C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, but we do what we can with what we have. We share an affinity for courtly and dated English prose (I allow myself a fleeting sense of bliss in my greater flair with it, but we do not judge intelligence by that metric), reading, occasional writing and stern introspection. We share an agreement on the sheer meaninglessness of life, the greater efficacy and need of a capitalist model of economy, the annoyances that younger siblings oftentimes are, a cold antipathy towards the generally sordid game that is politics, although we do profess some views (and our political positions would perhaps have been less emphatic had not the partisans of a differing perspective deemed us all villains, daring to think in froward defiance of their wisdom; lost are the days, alas, when civil disagreement was far more common).
But with regard to the general phenomenon of friendship, I would say that it is perfectly possible for a best friend to change. None of us are incipiently wise, and the metric we use to deem one ‘best’ could with ease change radically. I mentioned C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien in the foregoing paragraph. Long had they been close friends, but their friendship seemed to have soured by the 1950s. If such misfortune could befall such great men, we could not possibly be guaranteed exceptions to this possibility. The frequency may alter; the ‘best’ friend may not keep changing, but shall quite possibly change.
