The other day I scanned the internet for news of ex-friends who’d stayed significant in my memory. “We quarreled,” as French philosopher Sartre said about one former friend, the philosopher Merleau-Ponty, “a quarrel does not matter. It’s just one more way to live together.”

Anyway, it was a shock to discover that a certain philosopher ex-friend of mine had died ten years ago! So for ten years, I knew nothing about it! Any mutual friend who would have known must have predeceased him. 

So this belated farewell is about David, with surname withheld. I see from the obit with photo that he kept his good looks to the last as well as his creativity as a logician. When death interrupted the enterprise, he’d just patented a new way of adapting logic for computer use.

His gifts as a logician were the reason I passed the logic section of the Comprehensive Exams as a grad student in philosophy at Columbia. The year I took the grad comps, only four out of eighteen passed, but I was one of them. We first met when I’d hired him to tutor me in logic. What I could not do was work with standard logical notation – work with symbols. What David realized was that I could readily grasp the concepts, provided he put them into words! Most logicians would not have been able to make the translation that I needed, from symbols to words. But David understood logic in sufficient depth to have no difficulty doing that.

After a tutorial session, he would often walk me to the bus stop. One time, we shared views of a prof whose emptiness as a philosopher was matched only by the polysyllabic, pontifical wordiness of his lectures. “He probably pastes new words on the bathroom mirror in the morning so he can memorize them while he shaves,” was David’s speculation as we wended along.

Another time I asked him about his early years, before college. He’d been sent to a particularly rigorous prep school, I forget which one. “Send us the lonely, helpless, friendless boy,” I suggested a hypothetical motto, “and we send back the man?”

     “We send back the lonely, helpless, friendless man,” he said, supplying the final paragraph for our imaginary school brochure.

Later, when we found ourselves colleagues at The City University of New York, we got together sometimes to share philosophically exploratory conversations. That’s actually rarer than it sounds, among colleagues in the profession. He lacked nothing in the dimension of intelligence or in the dimension of philosophical curiosity.

There was, however, a lacuna in the realm of character. There came a moment when the future of our philosophy department hung on the vote for department chair. The powerful, senior, tenured members of the department backed a candidate manifestly unqualified but (as they seemed to believe) more controllable by themselves. The untenured, young assistant professors backed a rival candidate who appeared more able to do the job properly. 

David held the swing vote and at the last minute he swung it toward the cabal of the powerful. When they won, all the young assistant professors who’d voted for the loser got fired at the first opportunity. After he’d rethought the moral price of his ticket to tenure and decided (by means of a more discerning vote of which the reigning cabal did not approve) David was fired as well. And so, belatedly, he too joined the Fearless Fellowship of the Honorable Losers. 

The dramas

of academic departments

are dramas of character.

So David was a mixed character. Perhaps he reckoned that his breeding, good looks and intelligence bestowed on him a wider margin than more plebeian people enjoyed – allowing him to skirt the edges of honor. But he was also intelligent enough to worry about it.

I remember one time when he rang my bell after midnight, asking to come up. Though I was in my blue nylon shorty pajamas, I could sense that this was not a social call. So I said yes. 

He took the only comfortable chair in my one-room apartment and began to say what was on his mind. He mentioned that I’d recently uttered some words of warning and concern about the direction that his life seemed to be taking. 

    “You talked as if you knew. How did you know?”

By now I no longer remember the words I found, but I did recognize the reality of his crisis. However, I also brought up a particular case of dereliction, one that concerned him and me alone. It happened that he’d borrowed five hundred dollars from me in exchange for a post-dated check. Then he called to tell me not to deposit it. By now, more than a year had passed and the unrepaid loan was becoming a burden to me. It forced me to carry my awareness of possible dishonesty. That night I mentioned that I had told a few members of the Fearless Fellowship about it.

     “You told them?” he said as if in shock, and immediately got up to write a check, which he left on my dining table. It was not till he was gone that I picked up his check and saw to my surprise that it was in the amount of just $25! 

One collegial friend suggested that the money replaced sexual favors never bestowed but I thought otherwise. He didn’t need five hundred and he didn’t need my sexual favors. He was simply toying with wrongdoing – like Augustine stealing his neighbor’s pears – for the sake of doing the wrong thing because it was wrong. He was a young prince and believed he had right and wrong at his beck and call.

Finally, just before the statute of limitations was about to expire on legal redress, I asked my lawyer to act on my behalf. My lawyer called his new employer. The outstanding $475 arrived by return mail. And of course the friendship was over.

I never regretted it and – despite the loss of a friendship important to me – never wished him back with his debt unpaid. Rather, I felt that forcing him to pay his debt was all I could do for him now.

A few years later, when he was driving while drunk, his car accident killed the young son who’d been beside him in the front seat. From what I heard, he became an upright citizen after that, perhaps even a churchgoer. I’m not sure how deep the change went. It might have been merely a case of remorse turning into inward rigidity. But I don’t know how he lived it. In any case, he did change, after this most devastating of life-crashes.

Since our friendship was at an end, I never learned how, in personal terms, he lived the time that remained. But I hope that his inherited sense of honor got the upper hand finally and I do wish him well, wherever he is now. 

Perhaps, beneath it all –

we might still be friends.