I really enjoy reading books with friends and wrestling with the fundamental questions of “the great conversation” together. I love picturing past contemporaneous authors doing the same, the Inklings and Maecenas’ circle gathering over something a little stronger than Dr. Pepper. Seriously, imagine being friends with C. S. Lewis or Virgil! In fact, I would like to think that, in a way, we are, and that brings me to the question I want to reflect on with you. How can we read books not only with friends, but as friends? In other words, can these authors, despite our separation by time, become our friends through our study of their great texts? Some striking similarities do stand out between friendship and studying great texts, and this essay explores the value of those great texts through this metaphor of friendship.
Before progressing, let me clarify that a real difference exists between the friendships we experience with those alive with us today and those commemorated in books. While I draw out similarities that help us enter into our readings more deeply, I encourage my readers to enter simultaneously more deeply into relationships with their neighbors. God has given each experience its own riches; I wish for neither’s deprivation. Great texts offer wonderfully relevant wisdom, consolation, humor, and inspiration, but you cannot offer the same to them in the reciprocity of the truest friendship. Neither can you physically nourish one another. I once mused, “You cannot hug a poem like you cannot hug a phantom”—and a cup of water is not life-giving to a page. You gasp in horror, but you know we have all been there. In short, the quasi-immortality authors achieve through great texts does not preserve a whole person (sorry, Horace and Ovid). Consequently, our friendship with great texts is metaphorical, which does not make it worthless, but rather worthy in a different way. But enough caveats—let us ponder the beneficial similarities between great texts and friendship that spark the metaphor in the first place. Both extend to us faithful companionship, longed-for relatability, maturing conversation, and increasing degrees of influence.
How can we read books not only with friends, but as friends?
Our friends are the people we go through life with. While our authors must endure the downside of being dead, they possess the marvelous advantage of traveling around in their books wherever we go, mimicking friends’ close companionship. Cicero commends the constancy of studying great texts in his Pro Archia:
Other pursuits belong not to all times, all ages, all conditions; but this gives stimulus to our youth and diversion to our old age; this adds a charm to success, and offers a haven of consolation to failure. In the home it delights, in the world it hampers not. Through the night-watches, on all our journeying, and in our hours of country ease, it is our unfailing companion.
Is this not praise enough for such studies? In a world of change, we yearn for intimate and long-term connection. We want people to be there for us while we are young and “new” at life, and when we grow old and are still trying to figure out how to live well. We crave their shared joy through our happiness, as well as their comfort through our sadness. We want them with us in and outside our homes. And here is Cicero describing that kind of desired companionship—but through literature! If his comparison of great texts to friendship is not already obvious, a passage from his De Amicitia (“On Friendship”) makes it even clearer. Gaius Laelius recalls his friendship with the late Scipio Africanus Minor:
In it I found agreement on public questions; in it, counsel in private business, and in it, too, a leisure of unalloyed delight. . . there was one home for us both; we had the same fare and shared it in common, and we were together not only in our military campaigns, but also in our foreign tours and on our vacations in the country.
Specific words in this depiction of togetherness enhance the connection between the passages. Cicero uses oblectationis to convey the “delight” of friendship, which contains the same root as both his wording for the great texts’ “diversion” of “old age” (oblectant), as well as their “delights” at “home” (delectant). The pairing of the friends’ “foreign tours” and “vacations in the country” (peregrinationes rusticationesque) likewise takes on the corresponding verb forms in great texts’ companionship through “our journeying” and “country ease” (peregrinantur, rusticantur). I need not even mention that the next sentence in De Amicitia remarks that Laelius and Scipio shared their studiis together.
Given Cicero writes his De Amicitia in 44 B.C., one cannot help but wonder if, as he speaks of the studies he defended in Pro Archia in 62 B.C., he further references his speech with these verbal parallels. He first paints a picture of books as friends. Now, he recycles his wording to emphasize the companionship of friends. This echo highlights for us the “friendishness” of books, insofar as they can accompany us faithfully through life.
But how do we make friends with them in the first place? As with our present-day friends, we first relate to authors when we discover similarities to ourselves in them. C. S. Lewis famously wrote, “The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one.’” We all know the thrill of finding a person shares a niche interest or relates to an experience that before felt unique, even isolating. The same bond occurs when we find past authors that are like us, addressing a question in humanity’s “great conversation” dear to our hearts.
Just as in friendship, we best begin—and continue—by being elated, or at least intrigued, to know someone shares an experience with us.
For instance, maybe you lost loved ones and suffer from chronic illness. May I introduce you to the life of Flannery O’Connor, who lost her father to lupus when she was 15 and then struggled with the same illness until she died at age 39? She once penned in a letter, “In a sense sickness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it’s always a place where there’s no company, where no one can follow.” She reflected on her suffering’s loneliness, but, ironically, hearing how others feel this way can offer a sort of companionship in our suffering.
Or maybe you are navigating the intricacies of love and friendship (or “freindship” for the doctus lector), secrecy and deceit, assumption and correction, patience and wisdom in your local community. Upon opening a Jane Austen novel, you may be surprised to find uncannily parallel situations. Austen seems to understand you as you understand her characters.
Connections like these draw us in to listen to what else an author has to say. Just as in friendship, we best begin—and continue—by being elated, or at least intrigued, to know someone shares an experience with us. Even with authors we anticipate disagreeing with in parts, finding common ground can be very helpful to stay engaged with getting to know the author. This relatability also comforts and encourages us down the line, as those who have been through the same things offer consolation, insight, and advice. After all, this makes their constant companionship, even in sorrow, pleasing.
And then, just as friendship grows through conversation, we keep reading and interacting with our texts through metaphorical dialogue. Authors write of an idea or situation, we respond with our own in margins or papers, and we keep reading to see if they answer our questions or raise even more in the pages to come. Although great texts cannot read the annotations inscribed upon them and truly listen to the thoughts we offer, they still have a knack for replying to them somehow in their work anyway. Sometimes it is when we listen to what they are actually saying more carefully, which is a key (but often neglected) step in friendship, as well. This process produces an ongoing exchange of thought, which turns out to be Aristotle’s definition of friends’ living together: “For in the case of human beings what seems to count as living together is this sharing of conversation and thought, not sharing the same pasture, as in the case of grazing animals.” Even though it is a great gift to eat with our living friends, it is our dialogue with both these friends and our books that draw us into an even deeper connection with them.
And wonderfully, just as friends sharpen one another toward virtue, we find ourselves maturing through this conversation, for wrestling with an author’s ideas can yield wisdom we would not have reached on our own. Solomon commented on the value of such togetherness in Ecclesiastes: “Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow.” We can read this in a figurative sense as well as a literal one. Friends are there to pick each other up when they fall physically, but also when they fall into error. Sometimes we have the eyes to recognize an author has slipped into one erroneous ditch characteristic of his age, and the next chapter the author drags us out of the other treacherous trench that we, stuck in our own time, were previously blind to (an idea C. S. Lewis describes in his preface to Athanasius’ On the Incarnation as well). For example, the pages of my reading list this past semester grew ornate with comments such as “Is this a bit gnostic?” as well as “Oh dear, this is convicting about humility… Dear Lord, vanquish my pride.” Both Aristotle and Cicero discuss the important pursuit of virtue in friendship; our conversation with great texts thus refines how we see we ought to live.
Wrestling with an author’s ideas can yield wisdom we would not have reached on our own.
Lastly, just as quality time with friends increases their effect, our time with great texts increases their metaphorical friendship’s influence. Seneca also compares reading to friendship:
You should be extending your stay among writers whose genius is unquestionable, deriving constant nourishment from them if you wish to gain anything from your reading that will find a lasting place in your mind. To be everywhere is to be nowhere. People who spend their whole life traveling abroad end up having plenty of places where they can find hospitality but no real friendships.
Just as hastening between many acquaintances hampers more substantial relationships, reading many different authors gives us a little knowledge spread over much but not a richer knowledge about specific areas.
While I might disagree with Seneca here slightly and suggest the value of literature surveys for context, I do gain much more from authors when I spend significant time focusing on them. Instead of knowing a few soundbites, I am familiar with their different stories and their tensions, the ways they try to handle the world, and aspects of their personalities I can sense from their writing. They feel like old friends, and I call them that. You have met them through my references in this piece. Intensive classes on these authors seared their words and ideas into my mind, and these often guide me through analyzing my grief and joy and deciding how to act amid them. Reading generally provides us with guidance when we stumble on a relevant passage, but reading on this more intimate level gives their guidance a “lasting place in your mind.” These experiences, Seneca tells us, are like “real friendships,” and we end with an application of that bit of gold.
A great thing about books is that we can carry them with us pretty much anywhere. But the even greater thing is, we can spend so much time with an author that our very brains become the books that accompany and teach us through day and night, youth and old age, success and failure, private and public decisions, home-making and sojourning, work and rest—even prison, if you follow Boethius’ footsteps. That is, I suppose, a sort of “sticking closer than a brother.” I hope that in this new year we enjoy that kind of friendship with great texts, taking advantage of their close companionship throughout our lives, always connecting over our common ground, and developing through conversation with our special interlocuters. Maybe even do it with your living friends, too.