Oh My Friend !

Kahlil Gibran, self-portrait

In his narrative poem, when a youth inquires about the essence of friendship, Gibran’s prophet answers: 

Your friend is your needs answered.
He is your field which you sow with love and reap with thanksgiving.
And he is your board and your fireside. For you come to him with your hunger, and you seek him for peace.
When your friend speaks his mind you fear not the “nay” in your own mind, nor do you withhold the “ay.”
And when he is silent your heart ceases not to listen to his heart;
For without words, in friendship, all thoughts, all desires, all expectations are born and shared, with joy that is unacclaimed.

Diagram from my taxonomy of the four levels of platonic relationships.

More than a decade before the brilliant and underappreciated French philosopher Simone Weil considered the paradox of friendship and separation, Gibran offers assurance that absence is only a clarifying and fortifying force for the bond:

When you part from your friend, you grieve not;
For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, as the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain.

In a sentiment C.S. Lewis would come to echo in his poetic insistence that friendship “has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival,” Gibran adds:

And let there be no purpose in friendship save the deepening of the spirit.
For love that seeks aught but the disclosure of its own mystery is not love but a net cast forth: and only the unprofitable is caught.

Gibran ends the fragment on friendship with a vital reminder that the measure of closeness is not the magnitude of intensity and the heaviness two people entrust in one another but the ability to dance across the entire spectrum of being with equal ease:

In the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures.
For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.