Friendship

As anyone who knows me or has read this blog (is there a difference?) knows, I read a lot. I very often come across things I wish to share with you all, but I generally stop myself before getting to that point. After all, there is nothing so annoying as someone who shows you pictures of their newborn without warning you first. At all events, this particular stretch of words struck me as being particularly on point with regard to our circle. Certainly it comes far nearer to expressing my view of us than anything I could have said or written on my own. Thus, without further ado, I offer you this. I apologize for the length, but I could not bring myself to edit it.

Others again would say that Friendship is extremely useful, perhaps necessary for survival, to the individual. But when we speak thus we are using friend to mean "ally." In ordinary usage friend means, or should mean, more than that. A Friend will, to be sure, prove himself to be also an ally when alliance becomes necessary; will lend or give when we are in need, nurse us in sickness, stand up for us among our enemies, do what he can for our widows and orphans. But such good offices are not the stuff of Friendship. The occasions for them are almost interruptions. They are in one way relevant to it, in another not. Relevant, because you would be a false friend if you would not do them when the need arose; irrelevant, because the role of benefactor always remains accidental, even a little alien, to that of a Friend. It is almost embarrassing. For Friendship is utterly free from Affection's need to be needed. We are sorry that any gift or loan or night-watching should have been necessary---and now, for heaven's sake, let us forget all about it and go back to the things we really want to do or talk of together. Even gratitude is no enrichment to this love. The stereotyped "Don't mention it" here expresses what we really feel. The mark of perfect Friendship is not that help will be given when the pinch comes (of course it will) but that, having been given, it makes no difference at all. It was a distraction, an anomaly. It was a horrible waste of the time, always too short, that we had together. Perhaps we had only a couple of hours in which to talk and, God bless us, twenty minutes of it has had to be devoted to affairs.

For of course we do not want to know our Friend's affairs at all. Friendship, unlike Eros, is uninquisitive. You become a man's Friend without knowing or caring whether he is married or single or how he earns his living. What have all these "unconcerning things, matters of fact" to do with the real question, Do you see the same truth? In a circle of true Friends each man is simply what he is: stands for nothing but himself. No one cares two-pence about anyone else's family, profession, class, income, race or previous history. Of course you will get to know about most of these in the end. But casually. They will come out bit by bit, to furnish an illustration or an analogy, to serve as pegs for an anecdote; never for their own sake. That is the kingliness of Friendship. We meet like sovereign princes of independent states, abroad, on neutral ground, freed from our countries. This love (essentially) ignores not only our physical bodies but that whole embodiment which consists of our family, job, past and connections. At home, besides being Peter or Jane, we also bear a general character; husband or wife, brother or sister, chief, colleague or subordinate. Not among our Friends. It is an affair of disentangled, or stripped, minds. Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.

Hence (if you will not misunderstand me) the exquisite arbitrariness and irresponsibility of this love. I have no duty to be anyone's Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

When I spoke of Friends as side by side or shoulder to shoulder I was pointing a necessary contrast between their posture and that of the lovers whom we picture face to face. Beyond that contrast I do not want the image pressed. The common quest or vision which unites Friends does not absorb them in such a way that they remain ignorant or oblivious of one another. On the contrary it is the very medium in which their mutual love and knowledge exist. One knows nobody so well as one's "fellow." Every step of the common journey tests his metal; and the tests are tests we fully understand because we are undergoing them ourselves. Hence, as he rings true time after time, our reliance, our respect and our admiration blossom into an Appreciative love of a singularly robust and well-informed kind. If, at the outset, we had attended more to him or less to the thing our Friendship is "about," we should not have come to know or love him so well. You will not find the warrior, the poet, the philosopher or the Christian by staring in his eyes as if he were your mistress: better fight beside him, read with him, argue with him, pray with him.

In a perfect Friendship this Appreciative love is, I think, often so great and so firmly based that each member of the circle feels, in his secret heart, humbled before all the rest. Sometimes he wonders what he is doing there among his betters. He is lucky beyond desert to be in such company. Especially when the whole group is together, each bringing out all that is best, wisest, or funniest in all the others. Those are the golden sessions; when four or five of us after a hard day's walking have come to our inn; when our slippers are on, our feet spread out towards the blaze and our drinks at our elbows; when the whole world, and something beyond the world, opens itself to our minds as we talk; and no one has any claim on or any responsibility for another, but all are freemen and equals as if we had first met an hour ago, while at the same time an Affection mellowed by the years enfolds us. Life---natural life---has no better gift to give. Who could have deserved it?

Who indeed. Nothing I have ever read or heard has come as near as this passage to capturing how I feel. Thanks to all those who call me Friend.

A question, revisited

As promised, I'm back to ask the same question. However, this time, I'm offering you more information about each job and location. All amounts listed are biweekly. All incomes are post taxation, with both federal and state allotments having been considered. (No doubt all those systems will change next year, but not by much. I think the numbers are very close to reality for a few years to come.) All payments are estimated based on copious research. (Thank you, Lea.) Let me know what you think. (Woodberry Forest's income is estimated at $36,000.00 per annum. This is low, I know, but all the hints I've gotten have pointed toward a low-ball offer. I'll let you know more when I do.)

One thing I should mention up front is that the Maryland tax formula was impossible to find. This is because, in Maryland, each county assesses taxes at a different rate and those rates are included in your overall formula. Thus, since I don't know which county I'll be living in just yet, I've assumed an overall state tax rate of 4%, which exceeds every county so far as I can tell.

NSA
Location: Fort Meade, MD
Salary: $2428.34
House: $700.00
Food: $150.00
Utilities: $300.00
Tuition (Lea): $500.00
Excess: $778.34

Metron
Location: Reston, VA
Salary: $2254.30
House: $700.00
Food: $150.00
Utilities: $300.00
Tuition (Lea): $500.00
Excess: $554.30

University of Findlay
Location: Findlay, OH
Salary: $1536.60
House: $400.00
Food: $150.00
Utilities: $250.00
Tuition (Lea): $0.00
Excess: $736.60

Woodberry Forest School
Location: Orange, VA
Salary: $1109.18
House: $0.00
Food: $0.00
Utilities: $60.00
Tuition (Lea): $500.00
Excess: $549.18

Bear in mind that tuition is an average cost over a four-year track. If Lea went at a slower or faster pace, you'd have to adjust in accordingly. Also, food and utilities are admittedly estimate with very little supporting evidence. Feel free to pick at those numbers if you know enough to do so.

Also, Metron has a number of ways in which I could earn more money, such as profit-sharing and project leadership. But, at least initially, I thought you should see the jobs stacked up without add-ons. Thanks.

Recent Reading

For those of you who don't know, I read a lot. As a standard, I read three books at a time, and nearly always one is a classic. This has been the rule for the last eight years or so, and in that time I've learn much more than I would have thought possible...a point recently brought to my attention at a dinner party I attended.

At all events, I recently finished a book I found particularly moving and out of the ordinary for its author. Above all, I find that the Author's Note that follows the book to be the most powerful part of it, and I thought I'd share that with you all here.

This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed---run over, maimed, destroyed---but they continued to play anyhow. We really all were very happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terrible brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief: even when we could see it, we could not believe it. For example, while I was writing this I learned that the person on whom the character Jerry Fabin is based killed himself. My friend on whom I based the character Ernie Luckman died before I began the novel. For a while I myself was one of these children playing in the street; I was, like the rest of them, trying to play instead of being grown up, and I was punished. I am on the list below, which is a list of those to whom this novel is dedicated, and what became of each.

Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgment. When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social error, a life-style. In this particular life-style the motto is, "Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying," but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory. It is, then, only a speeding up, an intensifying, of the ordinary human existence. It is not different from your life-style, it is only faster. It all takes place in days or weeks or months instead of years. "Take the cash and let the credit go," as Villon said in 1460. But that is a mistake if the cash is a penny and the credit a whole lifetime.

There is no moral in this novel; it is not bourgeois; it does not say they were wrong to play when they should have toiled; it just tells what the consequences were. In Greek drama they were beginning, as a society, to discover science, which means causal law. Here in this novel there is Nemesis; not fate, because any one of us could have chosen to stop playing in the street, but, as I narrate from the deepest part of my life and heart, a dreadful Nemesis for those who kept on playing. I myself, I am not a character in this novel; I am the novel. So, though, was our entire nation at this time. This novel is about more people than I knew personally. Some we all read about in newspapers. It was, this sitting around with our buddies and bullshitting while making tape recordings, the bad decision of the decade, the sixties, both in and out of the establishment. And nature cracked down on us. We were forced to stop by things dreadful.

If there was any "sin," it was that these people wanted to keep on having a good time forever, and were punished for that, but, as I say, I feel that, if so, the punishment was far too great, and I prefer to think of it only in a Greek or morally neutral way, as mere science, as deterministic impartial cause-and-effect. I loved them all. Here is the list, to whom I dedicate my love:

• To Gaylene, deceased
• To Ray, deceased
• To Francy, permanent psychosis
• To Kathy, permanent brain damage
• To Jim, deceased
• To Val, massive permanent brain damage
• To Nancy, permanent psychosis
• To Joanne, permanent brain damage
• To Maren, deceased
• To Nick, deceased
• To Terry, deceased
• To Dennis, deceased
• To Phil, permanent pancreatic damage
• To Sue, permanent vascular damage
• To Jerri, permanent psychosis and vascular damage

... and so forth.
In Memoriam. These were comrades whom I had; there are no better. They remain in my mind, and the enemy will never be forgiven. The "enemy" was their mistake in playing. Let them all play again, in some other way, and let them be happy.

I was so taken with these words that I felt compelled to read them to Lea. She listen patiently and found them less moving than I did, but moving nonetheless. That is why I felt compelled to share them with you.

A question for the masses (all 5 of them.)

Hey all. I know it's been a while since I've posted, but my reason for not doing so is both pervasive and perpetual---almost nothing I say or think is worth your time. And, for the record, I will not attempt to contradict that notion with this post. This one is entirely self-serving...well...more so than usual.

As many of you know, I am in the midst of interviews. Tomorrow I have my fourth in a rather short span of time (about 3 weeks, give or take a day.) And, as I sit here preparing for the latest round, so to speak, I am wondering about a great many things. About the paths that lay before me. No doubt we all come to forks in the road we walk along more often than we know, but I think we rarely anticipate the forks. I think the general trend is to see them only in hindsight.

I, however, am faced with a quandary. Unlike most of the other graduate students I know, I am interviewing for pretty much every class of job. There are essentially four classes in my area: Government, Industry, Academic (University), Academic (Other). All of these could be split further save possibly for the first, but that's not my point. My point is that I have had an interview with the NSA (it's ongoing, but I've got a provisional offer complete with a salary quote); Metron, INC (a think tank of sorts that solves high-end problems for both government and private institutions); and Woodberry Forest (a boarding school about 90 minutes out of DC with a large endowment and a lot of history.) And tomorrow, I have an interview with the University of Findlay, Ohio (a private university with undergraduate and graduate programs and the expectation that I will do a lot of teaching and a shade of research, but some nonetheless.)

My question to you folks is this: knowing me as each of you do, where do you believe I would best fit? A poll is to the right...I'd appreciate a response from as many of you as possible. Thanks :)

Jitters

In about 15 minutes, I am going to be making the first of several presentations in nominal defense of my thesis. I say nominal because these are not the real thing. The real thing, as it were, will last only 40 minutes or so and will contain only highlights. Today's presentation is the real deal, so to speak. I have tell my advisor what I've been doing and why it's a good thing and all that. It ought to be entertaining.

For those interested, I can post notes from my presentations if you like. Or, if we're all together soon, I could present to you. I could use the practice. Anyway, wish me luck.

Not all who wander are lost. ---J.R.R. Tolkien

Not all who study are wise. ---Michael Gunderson