Recently, I was challenged by a friend to defend my conviction that our friendship would last beyond college. That she should seriously question my strongly-held conviction was almost unbelievable to me, which unbelief I’m sure I conveyed in my ensuing profusion of emotional and only quasi-logical explanations. But my exasperated response was apparently insufficient for her, so in what follows I will try to support, more articulately, my belief that physical distance cannot dissolve friendship.
An argument should begin with a definition of terms, so I’ll begin with my working definition of friendship: To be a friend is to share with someone a conception of the good and additionally to wish for them that good.
For understanding the first part of friendship — a common conception of what is good — C.S. Lewis’ image is helpful. Friends, he says, in contrast to lovers who face each other, face forward. This is because a friend is someone with whom we admire and seek something other than each other. Physical distance, then, is detrimental to lovers but not to friends. Lovers need to see each other; friends need only see the good and know that somewhere, some time, in some way, the friend is also seeing that good. When miles are piled between friends, the nature of friendship does not substantially change. The telos was never “seeing you,” and neither is it now; the telos was always “seeing the good,” and so it remains.
The second part of friendship is desire for the friend’s sight and acquisition of the good. As a friend, I must care not only about the good itself but about the other person’s relation to it. Friendship’s shared knowledge of and movement toward the good is not competitive. It is not the case, in my recognition of knowing and loving the same thing as someone, that my reason for including her is the increase in knowledge and the assistance in movement she provides for me. Although this personal increase and assistance may be effects of the friendship, they are not its essence. Friendship is fundamentally and always other-focused. Friendship requires charity — requires that I care for her knowledge of and her journey toward the good as much as, if not more than, I care for my own.
For as long as we love the same goods and wish them for each other, we will be friends. Here physical space is weak. Here time has no claim. Lack of communication, even, cannot become a strong enough assailant upon this permanent thing, friendship, reserved for permanent beings.