Thursday, August 2, 2007

FRIENDSHIP (exerpts) by Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are two elements that go to the
composition of friendship, each so sovereign
that I can detect no superiority in either, no
reason why either should be first named.
One is Truth. A friend is a person with
whom I may be sincere. Before him I may
think aloud. I am arrived at last in the
presence of a man so real and equal, that I
may drop even those undermost garments of
dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought,
which men never put off, and may deal with
him with the simplicity and wholeness with
which one chemical atom meets another.
Sincerity is the luxury allowed, like diadems
and authority, only to the highest rank, that
being permitted to speak truth, as having
none above it to court or conform unto.
Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance
of a second person, hypocrisy begins. We
parry and fend the approach of our fellowman
by compliments, by gossip, by
amusements, by affairs. We cover up our
thought from him under a hundred folds. Almost every man we
meet requires some civility, — requires to
be humored; he has some fame, some talent,
some whim of religion or philanthropy in his
head that is not to be questioned, and which
spoils all conversation with him. But a
friend is a sane man who exercises not my
ingenuity, but me. My friend gives me
entertainment without requiring any
stipulation on my part. A friend, therefore, is
a sort of paradox in nature. I who alone am,
I who see nothing in nature whose existence
I can affirm with equal evidence to my own,
behold now the semblance of my being, in
all its height, variety, and curiosity,
reiterated in a foreign form; so that a friend
may well be reckoned the masterpiece of
nature.

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