This is a week when I’ve been thinking about old friends who are, as it happens, ex-friends. Maybe it’s a special category of friendship.

 I’ve devoted a recent column to David, who was a valued philosophical colleague. Together we shared the intellectual trust that allowed us to open a wide array of questions to unfettered thinking. Not tired, not bored, not exasperated, not looking over our respective shoulders to make sure we were safely between the lines of whatever was in philosophical fashion that year. It was fun! And it was real. 

 I don’t know why he had to go and spoil it, first by temporarily trading his departmental vote for job security without honor, second by borrowing money from me that he didn’t need and didn’t plan to pay back. The latter forced on me a choice between becoming his victim or calling in my lawyer and thereby ending the friendship. Years later, he got into his car drunk and crashed his car, killing the son beside him in the passenger seat. 

Though I’ve previously told his story here, there was one sequel I didn’t tell. I saw him again. It was during the fifteen minutes a day I spend on the elliptical – an exercise machine that’s one part of my daily Rehab schedule. We keep exercise paraphernalia on the lower floor, which also holds a wall-length bookcase, a record player, a couch and a TV. (The TV we’ve had no time for, since my fracture of May 2nd.)

 Anyway, I was alone on the elliptical, singing along with the hillbilly hymns I play when I exercise. I know, I know, for a New York Jewish girl, it’s an uncommon taste … .

 David was standing there.

 He stood in front of me. He looked a little different. No boyish charm. 

No half-smile. In fact, no greeting of any kind. But I recognized him – unmistakably. In the years I’d known him, I’d never seen the stern and implacable stance that was his now. But it was oddly telling.

 What was he telling me?

 He’d been a highly civilized person. Such people are born into a responsibility. They carry the mantle of the civilization they’ve inherited, to which they have a duty. What duty? It’s a duty to maintain that civilization and carry it forward, up to the next level of advancement, in whatever field they are active – insofar as they can.

 His ghost told me that he knew that. He knew he had a long, wasted line of life-experience to make up for. Only when that was done, and what he owed had been paid out, could there be any prospect of rekindling our friendship. So not in any literally foreseeable future. Not in this world, or the next.

 It was in fact a rather grim visitation. No sentimental hopes from my side were going to be gratified.

 *. *. *

 While I’m on this topic, there was one other event that occurred during the same week. It concerned another departure. While I was looking on the internet to find out what happened to certain bygone figures, I came across my first love, the thief of my virginity, on the Obit screen. He died this very summer, about a month ago. The funeral notice in French was brief, devoid of encomiums, telling where to send flowers, describing him as a philosopher and painter. For the philosopher part, one communist party-line book was cited, which I am confident the world will never need. As for the paintings, the ones I’ve seen were unfashionably realistic (and only in that sense unconventional) but otherwise uninspired. So, finis? The end?

 What I found remarkable was what I felt. Nothing. Really nothing. Das Nichts selbst nichtet, to borrow a line from Heidegger. “The Nothing nothings.” A life totally without distinction, devoid of ideality, a timeline traduced.

 In this case, no painful process of self-repair looked to be in the offing. I would have cared about that, had there been any sign of it. But it seems there wasn’t. So far as I could detect, he regretted nothing, having seemingly forgotten that once there’d been something to regret.

 With our lives, we write our true stories. And they count for something.

And if we neglect to do that –

 that is counted too.