Friendship

This is a really nice article from Ralph Waldo Emerson, an American essayist, philosopher, and poet, about Friendship. I really value my friendship with people. I always keep in mind that friendships are unconditional. I always try my best not to disappoint all of my friends and that means I value honesty and trust. When a friend lied to me, I can easily forgive him/her but it takes time for me to actually forget about the lies that he/she has done. People always say forgive and forget, I can apply that concept for me but it will more likely to be like this...forgive, forgive, forgive, let go, let go, let go and forget. So, here a poem and short writing about friendship. I love all the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson...and this new findings makes me love his works even more..

A ruddy drop of manly blood

The surging sea outweighs,

The world uncertain comes and goes,

The lover rooted stays.I fancied he was fled,

And, after many a year,

Glowed unexhausted kindliness

Like daily sunrise there.

My careful heart was free again, —

O friend, my bosom said,

Through thee alone the sky is arched,

Through thee the rose is red,

All things through thee take nobler form,

And look beyond the earth,

And is the mill-round of our fate

A sun-path in thy worth.

Me too thy nobleness has taught

To master my despair;

The fountains of my hidden life

Are through thy friendship fair.

Friendship may be said to require natures so rare and costly, each so well tempered and so happily adapted, and withal so circumstanced, (for even in that particular, a poet says, love demands that the parties be altogether paired,) that its satisfaction can very seldom be assured. It cannot subsist in its perfection, say some of those who are learned in this warm lore of the heart, betwixt more than two.

I am not quite so strict in my terms, perhaps because I have never known so high a fellowship as others. I please my imagination more with a circle of godlike men and women variously related to each other, and between whom subsists a lofty intelligence. But I find this law of one to one peremptory for conversation, which is the practice and
consummation of friendship. Do not mix waters too much. The best mix as ill as good and bad.

You shall have very useful and cheering discourse at several times with two several men, but let all three of you come together, and you shall not have one new and hearty word. Two may talk and one may hear, but three cannot take part in a conversation of the most sincere and searching sort. In good company there is never such discourse between two, across the table, as takes place when you leave them alone. In good company, the individuals merge their egotism into a social soul exactly co-extensive with the several consciousnesses there present.

No partialities of friend to friend, no fondnesses of brother to sister, of wife to husband, are there pertinent, but quite otherwise. Only he may then speak who can sail on the common thought of the party, and not poorly limited to his own. Now this convention, which good sense demands, destroys the high freedom of great conversation, which requires an absolute running of two souls into one.

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