.:. WitNit .:.: The Company We Keep

June 5, 2005

The Company We Keep

f all intimate acts, methinks that reading, especially book reading and blog reading, is perhaps the most intimate. We expose ourselves to long and intense company with another mind, another soul.

There once was a time, up to the beginning of the telephone age, where letter writing was a craft and engaged in daily. Epistolary novels were common. Those days, once lost, have returned in a new incarnation. Emails held the promise, but blogs have delivered on it. Daily thoughts and diaries and comments and exchanges. Letter writing to a mass audience. Epistolary novels have returned via shared Blog Novels.

Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics talks about three kinds of friendship: friendship based on giving each other pleasure, friendship based on the usefulness or profit of the friendship, and friendship for its own sake.

Friendships based on pleasure last only as long as the pleasure last. Bonking buddies last as long as the bonking is pleasurable. Some books or blogs we hang with as long as the pleasure we come to expect from the author blogger continues. Once the pleasure comes to an end, the friendship comes to an end. Novels that we read only once for the pleasure of them. Bloggers we seek out for mere entertainment.

Friendships based on usefullness or profit last as long as the utility of the friendship lasts. Business buddies are friends as along as both work at the same firm. Members of the same sports team stay friends as long as they are part of the team. We hang with them as long as they are useful to us, and us to them. Same with books like How to Succeed in Business and bloggers like Instapundit, who act as a kind of blogging way station to a slew of daily links.

Friendships for their own sake can offer both pleasure and usefulness, but neither is the reason we hang with them. This kind of friendship is really for the sake of the friendly company itself, the living in the friendship. These are the books and blogs that we come back to because for some inexplicable reason we are improved by being in their presence. We share the same aspirations and loves.

These are the kinds of friends that Aristotle was talking about when he said, "Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods."

That's why people who strive for success and reach the top of the world in money and fame can be so miserable, because of all the friendships that had to be compromised along the way. Drugs and suicide result.

I can be as superficial as anyone else as a blogger. But I aspire to more. I don't always know how to go about it, other than watch those who already do it well, who express themselves directly with integrity and show some care for their writing. If you wonder who I'm talking about, just look at my blog list.

Just a little letter of thanks to you all. And the hopes of that third kind of friendship...

*** ...the underlying reason for writing is to bridge the gulf between one person and another. W.H. Auden

*** We owe everything to...authors, on this side of barbarism... with a few old authors, I can manage to get through the summer or winter months, without ever knowing what it is to feel ennui. They sit with me at breakfast; they walk out with me before dinner--and at night, by the blazing hearth, discourse the silent hours away. William Hazlitt

*** Sitting last winter among my books...I began to consider how I loved the authors of those books; how I loved them too, not only for the imaginative pleasures they afforded me, but for their making me love the very books themselves. Leigh Hunt

UPDATE: Eric at Straight White Guy has weighed in with more good stuff. He epitomizes the kind of blogger I'm talking about.

Pammy at Lollygaggin lets us in on the types of blogs she likes to read.

And Acidman at Gut Rumbles tells us that writing a blog is a lot like taking a Benjamin Franklin "air bath." Well said.

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Posted by witnit at June 5, 2005 9:20 AM