Can Your Best Friends be Books?

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From The Literary Hub:

Recently, reading a Mary Oliver essay collection, I stumbled across a piece called “My Friend Walt Whitman.” In it, she admits she had merely a few friends as a child in 1950s Ohio, and they were all dead. They were her favorite books.

Defiantly, she insists that, while inanimate, they were true friends. “Powerful and amazing,” “avuncular,” “full of metaphysical curiosity,” and “oracular tenderness.” Like the comic strip Calvin’s stuffed animal Hobbes, they accompanied her on adventures into the wilderness, their heavy weight in her backpack the reassuring equivalent of a human child’s hand in her own, encouraging her to go a little bit further. She was not alone.

They were not only companions, but mirrors. Or more than mirrors—they were seer stones. They allowed her to glimpse in herself qualities she didn’t even know she had yet: courage, wisdom, heart, the capacity to make and hold opinions based on a perception of the truth. That revelation came through the process of witnessing herself described, breathtakingly, in the texts. In Whitman’s practice of “loafing,” that miraculously self-confident laziness that encompassed pleasure and curiosity and wonder, she recognized her own strange style of being in the world, and saw that it could be so good, so lovely, that it was worth immortalizing in words. It also came through the joy of reading itself. She felt a sense of triumph interpreting complicated words, and not only interpreting them but seeing them, in her mind, expand into a whole imaginary world, one she could enter and survive.

Oliver also confesses that books were her friends because she felt frail in the real world.

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We say we want kids to read more, yet we also harbor a deep suspicion of the too-bookish kid. Fran Lebowitz, the writer, tells of barricading herself in a bedroom as a child to read. Her mother would bust open the door and shout, “Are you reading again?”

. . . .

To the extent that we do ponder it, we often think about it in economic terms. We say we “invest in” our friendships. We assume friendships take work and depend on, or are even essentially the sum total of, tangible deeds—the quantity of phone calls, Facebook likes, or coffee dates. We speak of “friendship maintenance” like the way we maintain a car. I actually used to put “friendship maintenance” on my daily to-do list along with my laundry and bills, reminding myself to call this friend, to surprise another one with a “random” Kindle gift. I had a therapist once who judged the quality of my friends with a single question: “Do they answer your WhatsApps immediately?” It was a proxy for care in our age, which is obsessed with anxiety about isolation. Our friendships are like the ledgers in checkbooks: what we put in equals what we get out.

WikiHow has a popular page called “How to Maintain a Friendship: 8 Steps.” Step one: “Keep your friendship rewarding.” In this model, friendship consists of a) doing things together, b) fastidiously maintaining maximum contact, and c) making sure your friend is doing an equal number of things for you, too. “Do nice things like getting their favorite candy,” it advises. “Take the time to really hear what they’re saying, and offer advice only if they ask for it… Visit whenever you can… Schedule video chats online… Try out Zumba together. It will bring you closer.” In contemporary academic friendship studies, the keywords are “reciprocity” and “self-disclosure.”

Link to the rest at The Literary Hub