friendship

"I spent the holidays in New York, visiting old friends and reconnecting with a world that had continued without me in a way that felt both sad and comforting. On New Year’s Day we stopped in a used-book store, where I bought a little volume of quotations about friendship that I finally opened on the airplane back to Bozeman. Some were sentimental, others humorous—Samuel Johnson compared the feeling of friendship to being full of roast beef—but there was only one, from a letter by Emily Dickinson, that spoke of the sense of fulfillment that I sometimes suspect our friendships alone can provide. 

“My only sketch, profile, of Heaven,” Dickinson wrote, “is a large, blue sky, bluer and larger than the biggest I have seen in June, and in it are my friends—all of them—every one of them.”

Looking out the airplane window at the great blue sky, I thought about how making friends in midlife, while challenging, might also be a gift, a chance to enlarge one’s world and one’s self. It sometimes feels at 40 as if our lives have assumed their final shape, entrenched as we so often are in our careers and cities and relationships. But to meet new people like [her...] who sees me as I am right now, not as who I used to be—is to acknowledge the growing that we all have left to do. When I imagine my life in another 40 years’ time—full of old friends, yes, but also friends that I have yet to meet—it looks like a sketch of heaven indeed."

Katharine Smyth is the author of All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Point, and elsewhere.

via {the Atlantic}