Losing Friends In Our Time

“I have lost more friends over the past six years than I even knew I had.”

False. For you cannot lose a friend. You can only lose illusions. To “lose a friend” is merely to realize that there was no friend. That is a pure gain; an evolution from ignorance to knowledge. Better no true friends than a hundred illusions.

“What in the world happened to him? He is not the man I knew.”

Nothing happened to him. Something happened to the world. Perhaps the world’s light was realigned so as to reveal a side of the man that you could not previously see — and that perhaps even the man himself had not seen clearly.

“Do they believe they are forsaking me — or that I have forsaken them?”

A friend in whose mind every day entails a reassessment of your friendship is no friend at all, but merely an ally. And everyone knows alliances are utilitarian calculations, nothing more. To place your trust in an ally is to bet your life on a salesman’s pitch.