the long goodbye
“Friendship is… The least natural of loves; the least instinctive, organic, biological, gregarious and necessary. Without Eros none of us would have been begotten and without Affection none of us would have been reared; but we can live and breed without Friendship. This ‘non-natural’ quality in Friendship goes far to explain why it was exalted in the ancient and medieval times… Affection and Eros were too obviously connected with our nerves, too obviously shared with the brutes. You could feel these tugging at your guts and fluttering in your diaphragm. But in Friendship - in that luminous, tranquil, rational world of relationships freely chosen - you got away from all that. This alone, of all the loves, seemed to raise you to the level of gods or angels.”
—The Four Loves (1960) by C.S. Lewis
October 2011
12 posts
“I have no duty to be anyone’s Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”
—The Four Loves (1960) by C.S. Lewis
“Mathematics effectively began when a group of Greek friends got together to talk about numbers and lines and angles… The little knot of Friends who turn their backs on the ‘World’ are those who really transform it. Egyptian and Babylonian Mathematics were practical and social, pursued in the service of Agriculture and Magic. But the free Greek Mathematics, pursued by Friends as a leisure occupation mattered to us more.”
—The Four Loves (1960) by C.S. Lewis
