Years Of Friendship And Still Counting Quotes

Counting on each other became automatic. When I found a sweater in Texas I wanted, I learned to buy two, which was easier than seeing the look of disappointment on Caroline's face when I returned home with only one. When she went out from the boathouse on a windy day, she gave me her schedule in advance, which assuaged her worst-case scenario of flipping the boat, being hit on the head by an oar, and leaving Lucille stranded at home. I still have my set of keys to her house, to locks and doors that no longer exist, and I keep them in my glove compartment, where they have been moved from one car to another in the past couple of years. Someday I will throw them in the Charles, where I lost the seat to her boat and so much else.

The unrelenting grip of Soldier’s Syndrome slips finger by slow finger. The marrow’s been affected—emotional leukemia at the deepest level. Transplants of love and friendship aid healing, yet time is still key, and the clock never ticks fast enough. Eternity gains perspective when seconds feel like years. How long have I been gone? Six eternities and counting.

[W]e live in interwoven networks of terminally casual relationships. We live with the delusion that we know one another, but we really don’t. We call our easygoing, self-protective, and often theologically platitudinous conversations ‘fellowship,’ but they seldom ever reach the threshold of true fellowship. We know cold demographic details about one another (married or single, type of job, number of kids, general location of housing, etc.), but we know little about the struggle of faith that is waged every day behind well-maintained personal boundaries. One of the things that still shocks me in counselling, even after all these years, is how little I often know about people I have counted as true friends. I can’t tell you how many times, in talking with friends who have come to me for help, that I have been hit with details of difficulty and struggle far beyond anything I would have predicted. Privatism is not just practiced by the lonely unbeliever; it is rampant in the church as well.1

Of course, everything we had been speaking about was closely bound up with his interest in the philosophy of history. We discussed that subject for a whole afternoon, in connection with a difficult remark of his to the effect that the succession of the years could be counted but not numbered. This led us to the significance of sequence, number, series, direction. Did time, which surely was a sequence, have direction as well? I said that we had no way of knowing that time does not behave like certain curves that demonstrate a steady sequence at every point but have at no single point a tangent, that is, a determinable direction. We discussed the question whether years, like numbers, are interchangeable, just as they are numerable. I still possess a record of that part of the conversation, having written in my diary: “Benjamin’s mind revolves, and will long continue to revolve, around the phenomenon of myth, which he approaches from the most diverse angles: from history, with Romanticism as his point of departure; from literature, with Hölderlin as the point of departure; from religion, with Judaism as that point; and from law. If I ever have a philosophy of my own, he said to me, it somehow will be a philosophy of Judaism.