True Friendship Theme Analysis

The primary topic of Emerson’s essay is, as the title suggests, the nature of friendship. Emerson takes pains to differentiate true friendship from more superficial kinds of human relationships. In “Friendship,” Emerson emphasizes that meaningful friendship can neither be forced nor shallow. Instead, true friendship emerges by chance, when two compatible individuals form a relationship in which they can be entirely honest and authentic with each other, and through which they can bring meaning and dignity into one another’s lives.

Emerson insists that friends are encountered, not made. Who can and cannot become friends has nothing to do with the will or desire to form a connection, but with qualities inherent in both individuals. Emerson writes that “My friends have come to me unsought.” “The great God” gives them; Emerson does not intentionally make friends. Hence it is the “Deity” in Emerson and in his friend that “cancels the thick walls of individual character relation, age, sex, circumstance” and unites them. Friends are “self-elected,” rather than chosen, in that, regardless of how much one wants to befriend them, the potential friend must carry within him or her the “Deity.” A friend therefore cannot be intentionally made. Indeed, most efforts to form friendships are failures. Most normal friendships “hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the tough fiber of the human heart.” That is to say, people often choose friends for superficial reasons—like pleasure or fame—and not because of a real connection.  Normally people “snatch at the slowest fruit in the whole garden of God,” and instead of matching with an equal, “Almost all people descend to meet” in such a way that the “flower and aroma of the flower of each of the beautiful natures disappears as they approach each other.” Instead of actively seeking to make friends, therefore, Emerson merely remains open to the chance that he might encounter a true friend as he moves through the world. The result is that every encounter is potentially life-changing, because friendship is determined by divine forces beyond human knowledge and control.

Emerson notes that people change when they enter “actual society,” altering their thought and action to suit those around them.  But a precondition for friendship is that each individual be fully independent. Friendship is, in a way, a kind of solitary coexistence. Emerson writes that “There must be very two, before there can be very one.” That is, friendship only occurs between two entirely independent individuals who respect and even fear one another, but nonetheless recognize the “deep identity”—the shared presence of the Deity—that unites them. One is “real and equal” with such a true friend, rather than dishonest or hypocritical, as people can easily become when they are in the company of people to whom they lack a meaningful connection. With a true friend, Emerson writes, “I may think aloud.” A true friend is someone with whom one can be entirely sincere, unfiltered, and natural—just as one would be in solitude. In addition to being sincere, a true friend is someone with whom one shares “tenderness,” a kind of basic human connection that is simple and solid.

True friendship is not solely defined by being able to share the intimate details of one’s day-to-day life with another person—friends instead dignify one another’s lives by forming a community based on a more profound human connection. The path to friendship is not through visiting a friend’s house or getting to know his or her family. Emerson asks, rhetorically, “Are you the friend of your friend’s buttons, or of his thought?” Instead, friendships emerges in conversation and through letters, which reveals a friend’s soul, rather than the superficial trappings of his or her life. That said, friendship does not consist of fancy or fine things, either, such as banquet dinners or dancing or other forms of merriment. It may occur in a very “strict and homely” form, and in people from unexpected classes of society. Instead of being something that one practices now and then, true friendship lasts and affects “all the relations and passages of life and death.” Friends, whether they are present in person or only in one’s mind, “dignify to each other the daily needs and offices of man’s life,” and through the pleasure of true human connection, “add rhyme and reason to what was drudgery” through conversation and sympathy. Rather than merely serving as a shallow companion or a listening ear, a true friend actively improves and enriches an individual’s life.

True friendship, according to Emerson, fundamentally changes a person’s life in some ways, but does not change it at all in others. If friendship occurs between two “formidable natures,” who both harbor the “Deity” and respect one another, friendship can remake the world of each person, enhancing the mundane and solitary experience of life, and dignifying “drudgery” through conversation, reflection, and a sense of deep, but not overly intimate, community. At the same time, however, friendship requires that each person be independent, and behave with the other as he or she would act, think, and feel) in solitude. The paradoxical result is that true friendship emerges when two people are essentially alone together, living independently alongside one another.