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A realization visited me the other day. It had to do with lost friendships. I’d always pictured these losses as mere phenomena lying on the surface of life. In the depth, in the end – in the hereafter however we understand that term – this thin crust of misunderstanding would lift off. And then, once more, I felt that we would find ourselves back on friendship’s solid ground.

This expectation was strongest in the case of one friendship that I especially cherished. We were both women philosophers but couldn’t have been more different. Referencing a certain rare birth defect where twins are born physically connected to each other, she called us Conjoined-Twin-Opposites.

She was blond and Nordic. As a friend remarked, she “wore shorts with authority.” In winter, she liked to ski. As for summer, there was a remote Swedish island where she would spend a stretch of her time quite alone, finding rest and renewal in nature.

As for me, I liked to nurse a cup of coffee in a favorite café, write in my journal to discover the meanings of my recent days, meanwhile looking up from time to time to take in the people at the other tables – as if our silence as strangers to each other had its own unspoken sense and rhythm.

Since, like me, she was European enough to appreciate cafes, that’s where we would usually meet. Like any friends, we would share with each other the happenings of recent days but, like philosophers, also fit them into the ideas we thought capable of illuminating those events.

My efforts (of those days) to fit the real into a rational scheme would collide with her conviction that the real and the rational were hardly on speaking terms. I felt impelled to try to understand evil in philosophic terms if such understanding should prove at all possible. She contended that reality was beyond good and evil and that philosophy should frankly concede that.

What happened to all that –

to all we were to each other?

I told the story here recently. As time passed, my parents died and, in their absence, a formerly close person became an inventive and brilliantly persuasive social enemy. And my collegial friend – who’d supposed herself safely beyond good and evil – proved an easy mark.

It can happen sometimes that one needs to draw a line – wide and bright – between good and evil. My collegial woman friend had no training, no practice, no interest in doing that. So she was drawn in, blending socially with the widening vortex of false and defamatory gossip then being circulated at my expense.

After a long interval, at my prompting we got together one time in New York. In the telephone call that had prefaced this meeting, she’d denied that the shrewd intrigues of my adversary had played any part in the breakup of her friendship with me! I couldn’t decipher how, in her own mind, she explained our parting. So the sad memory of our rupture did not appear to be a shared one.

We did not meet at our old café, but in a more dingy one closer to the building where she lived. Through the plate glass window I saw her approach, walking with a cane. She brought me up to date on the partnerings and partings in the collegial circle that formerly had been common to us both. Nothing extraordinary had happened but I was happy to know the latest. Meanwhile, I took in the changes in my former friend. Clearly the old athleticism was gone. Likely too the Nordic zest for the solitary life on the fjord.

Still, till just the other day, I continued to suppose that we’d meet again and pick up where we left off – in the Great Café in the Sky.

Until it came to me that – barring a profound change of heart – that is not likely to happen. She’s living out the implications of the choice she made. 

Philosophers don’t jump the traces that easily. She has books and articles. She has a persona. These things have the binding character of commitments.

It’s unlikely she will ever return

To the life we once shared.

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