. . . I caught sight of a huge bundle of carpets, still rolled up, and propped against one end of the sideboard; and burying my head in it, swallowing its dust together with my own tears, as the Jews used to cover their heads with ashes in times of mourning, I began to sob. I shivered, not because the room was cold, but because a distinct lowering of temperature (against the danger and, if must be said, the by no means disagreeable sensation of which we make no attempt to react) is brought about by a certain kind of tears which fall from our eyes, drop by drop, like a fine, penetrating, icy rain, and seem as though they will never cease to flow. Suddenly I heard a voice:
"May I come in? Francoise told me you might be in the dining-room. I looked in to see whether you would care to come out and dine somewhere, if it isn't bad for your throat - there's a fog outside you could cut with a knife."
It was Robert de Saint-Loup, who had arrived in Paris that morning, when I imagined him to be still in Morocco or on the sea.
I have already said (and it was precisely Robert himself who at Balbec had helped me, quite unwittingly, to arrived at this conclusion) what I think about friendship: to wit, that it is so trivial a thing that I find it hard to understand how men with some claim to genius - Nietzsche, for instance - can have been on ingenuous as to ascribe to it a certain intellectual merit, and consequently to deny themselves friendships in which intellectual esteem would have no part. Yes, it has always been a surprise to me to think that a man who carried honesty with himself to the point of cutting himself off from Wagner's music from scruples of conscience could have imaged that the truth can ever be attained by the mode of expression, by its very nature vague and inadequate, which actions in general and acts of friendship in particular constitute, or that there can be any kind of significance in the fact of one's leaving one's work to go and see a friend and shed tears with him on hearing the false report that the Lourve has been burned down. I had reached the point, at Balbec, of regarding the pleasure of playing with a troop of girls as less destructive of the spiritual life, to which at least it remains alien, than friendship, the whole effort of which is directed towards making us sacrifice the only part of ourselves that is real and incommunicable (otherwise by means of art) to a superficial self which, unlike the others, finds no joy in its own being, but rather a vague, sentimental glow at feeling itself supported by external props, hospitalised in an extraneous individuality, where, happy in this protection that is afforded it there, it expresses its well-being in warm approval and marvels at qualities which it would denounce as failings and seek to correct in itself. Besides, the scorners of friendship can, without illusion and not without remorse, be the finest friends in the world, in the same way as an artist who is carrying a masterpiece within him and feels it his duty to live and carry on his work, nevertheless, in order not to be thought or to run the risk of being selfish, gives his life for a futile cause, and gives it all the more gallantly in that the reasons for which he would have preferred not to give it were disinterested. But whatever might be my opinion of friendship, to mention only the pleasure that it procured me, of a quality so mediocre as to be like something half-way between physical exhaustion and mental boredom, there is no brew so deadly that it cannot at certain moments become precious and invigorating by giving us just the stimulus that was necessary, the warm that we cannot generate ourselves.
Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, pp. 409-410
Here Proust ruminates on the values of friendship. Marcel is devastated by the letter from Mme de Stermaria cancelling his anticipated assignation, and almost magically his friend Robert shows up. As I get older I become even more certain that there are few things, if anything, more valuable than friendship. I remember years ago when my marriage was falling apart and I had finally left home, and was dealing with some crippling guilt for failing my wife and son, as well as some other personal crises, and, much like Robert, my great friend Cinse appeared out of the blue to save me, even if that simply meant listen to me lament about the cruelties of fate, while also having the common sense to occasionally tell me to shut up so that we could talk about her problems.
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