on friendship

I changed the top picture on my last post from the Monkton cartoon about Ninja Biscuits, to the one about Two Friends because the first image kept disappearing.

The text of the new picture, in case you're reading this in an RSS feed and can't be bothered looking at the site itself is:

Two Friends:

THE FRIENDS that connect in a mysterious way without even speaking.

Perhaps they have AMAZING SPECIAL POWERS.

Perhaps they are both just PECULIAR IN THE HEAD.

Then, in a lovely moment of serendipity, I was just reading an excerpt from C.S Lewis' The Problem of Pain, about friendship. It's essentially a lofty paragraph exploring the same concept as the cartoon, without the comic ending. It's a beautiful reflection on the joy of friendship and the longing for connection that is intrinsic to being human. And dare I say it, is Sehnsucht, in disguise.

First written by Lewis in a letter to Dom Bede Griffiths about friendship (November 1959):

Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year after year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it—tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest—if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself—you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say "Here at last is the thing I was made for." We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want....