Rules for Visiting

by Jessica Francis Kane

We live in a time when everyone gets a medal and all villains have heartbreaking backstories. No one thinks evil is intrinsic anymore, just someone making a really bad choice.

Afterward I was certain of only one thing: friendship is hard to define. Epicurus believed it was necessary for a happy life. Aristotle believed it was necessary for a good life. Cicero thought life wasn’t worth living without friends, but that they should be made slowly and cautiously. Montaigne thought friendship occurred once every three hundred years and he was, of course, one of the lucky ones. Oscar Wilde said a friend is one who stabs you in the front, and C. S. Lewis proposed ideograms: if lovers are two people facing each other enraptured by the other’s gaze, then friends are two people standing side by side, looking ahead in the same direction. I suppose today both figures might be looking down at their phones.

You grow up thinking it’s natural for the ones who love you most to keep their distance. Love stands apart; love lets you come to it. This isn’t wrong, exactly, but I wanted to learn how to stand closer.

I guess I’m just thinking of a time when that’s what friendship was. Instead of texts and coffee dates, people stayed with one another, for a fortnight if needed. Can you imagine? Having friends who would take you in for that long. Fortnight friends.”

“We take our friends as we find them, not as we would make them,”

Sometimes the door to friendship doesn’t open as far as you think it might, and you’re vulnerable standing there on the threshold, not yet in or out.

Holidays are hard for the same reason social media is hard: they allow us to think we know what everyone else is doing.

When a friend is suffering, it seems you have three options: You can sit silently with her, you can make suggestions, or you can share heartache from your own life. None of the three is as simple as it sounds. I knew someone in college who was so full of advice it was exhausting to share problems with her. You left with a small treatise of self-improvement ideas and the urge to lie down. Share too many of your own stories and tragedy starts to feel competitive. I opted for the first approach and put my hand on her warm back while she sobbed.

“I don’t need closure on the day. There’s just going to be another one in the morning.”

“Did you know people will underestimate the weight of a heavy backpack before climbing a steep hill if they’re standing next to a friend?”

It seems the trees’ plight is to be always underappreciated by humans while working the hardest of any plant on earth for them. We cut them down, we poison them, we introduce disease and destructive pests. But we also plant them when someone is born, we plant them when someone dies. We want them to measure and commemorate our lives, even as the way we live hurts them.

Happy is the house that shelters a friend,”

There is no friend as loyal as a book.’ Ernest Hemingway.”

“‘I would have friends where I can find them,’” she read, “‘but I seldom use them.’ Emerson.”

The Japanese have a word for the calming, restorative power of simply being in a forest or among trees: shinrin-yoku, forest bathing.

Perhaps a best friend is someone who . . . holds the story of your life in mind. Sometimes in music a melodic line is so beautiful the notes feel inevitable; you can anticipate the next note through a long rest. Maybe that is friendship. A best friend holds your story in mind so notes don’t have to be repeated.

“Because certain things only come into focus when a person is gone. It’s sad but true. You need memory and loss to polish your thoughts. Otherwise you’re just writing a speech or an introduction or something.”

Why do I like gardening? Because I worry I’ve inherited a certain hopelessness, a potentially fatal lack of interest, that I’m diseased with reserve. Making a garden runs counter to all that. You can’t garden without thinking about the future.

Is it real? I once asked Amber. What? she said. Your life! The things that happen to you. Is it real or are you just really good at making it all into stories? She said, I don’t understand the difference. —Alice

I’ve always loved those books where friends gather for a weekend and lives are changed.