Words&Dirt

“Aristotle’s opinion was that friends hold a mirror up to each other; through that mirror they can see each other in ways that would not otherwise be accessible to them, and it is this (reciprocal) mirroring that helps them improve themselves as persons.  Friends, then, share a similar concept of eudaimonia and help each other achieve it.  So it is not just that friends are instrumentally good because they enrich our lives, but that they are an integral part of what it means to live the good life.”

––Answers for Aristotle, by Massimo Pigliucci, pg. 179

“In the mornings I write long circular journal entries when I wake up.  Too early.  Before work.  But even though I am making steady proclamations about who I will go for next, and why, and how it will all be different, it is brutal to imagine the idea of meeting a new person.  Going through the same routine.  Saying the same phrases I have now said many times: the big statements, the grand revelations about my childhood and character.  The cautious revealing of insecurities.  I have said them already, and they sit in the minds of those people who are out living lives I have no access to anymore.  A while ago, this sharing was tremendous; now the idea of facing a new person and speaking the same core sentences seems like a mistake, an error of integrity.  Surely it is not good for my own mind to make myself into a speech like that.  The only major untouched field of discussion will have to do with this feeling, this tiredness, this exact speech.

The next person I love, I will sit across from in silence.  We will have to learn it from each other some other way.”

––”On a Saturday Afternoon,” from The Color Master, by Aimee Bender, pg. 58