Friendship Gained and Lost: the importance of forgiveness (October 1, 2022, the severed branch)
You helped form me into who I am today, but all I have now are the fragments of your light. They haunt my understanding of geography, history, travel, languages, and music.
Cluj, Romania is one of the places where I thought about you (photo my own, April 2009)
I remember the long afternoons sitting in our dorm room, reading on the futon, pretending you and I existed only in the candlelight which smelled of lavender and spiritual connection. We schemed to read Post War and drink red wine in the night. Our past time: hours-long vows of silence so that we could focus on our studies of Germany, Eastern Europe, and the dilemmas of the post-Communist world. You had just been to Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey, which made me dream of going there too. I listened eagerly to your lectures about Ataturk and the modern secular state, and a sense of my own ignorance steadily consumed me, driving me more toward happy thoughts of mastering the humanities than toward the actual work necessary to achieve the knowledge I craved. I was only 19, and I found it most pleasurable to fantasize with you in the dark. I was adamantly opposed to alcohol, so our discussions took precedent over partying, although talking and planning still came easier than doing. Maybe that’s why almost five years passed before I actually read Post War and immersed myself in the history of Europe since 1945. Our connection was by then permanently severed, I had lost you as my friend forever, and all I had left was a book I once longed to read with you but never did.
I thought of you recently when I was with a friend at a coffee shop. As you were, he was content to simply sit silently reading and occasionally look up to chat. We relished having found one another. Those kinds of friendships, driven forward by a mutual passion for the acquisition of knowledge and the absorption of literature, are difficult to come by amidst the generalized indolence of adulthood. Ours is a culture dedicated to consumption and entertainment; these are the ultimate inducements toward the capitalism which produces self-care goods and luxurious services like no other system devised by mankind. To simply sit reading with someone for a few hours as a social activity elicits sympathetic responses from the people who seem to feel sorry for us that we couldn’t find anything else to do. So when I was sitting with him, I thought of you, because you were the first, you came before. Bonding us was a mutual passion for history and political theory, which we pretended to master without allowing any syllabus to limit us. Or perhaps I have just described a difference between us? I read with a swift desperation that inhibited deeper understanding, as if I wished I could simply download all that information. You, on the other hand, I think relished the process itself; I craved a finish line where you saw none.
When I was recently reading The Pursuit of Power (Europe 1815 - 1914), I could sense your ghost there in the room with me. As I deepened my knowledge of the unifications of Italy and Germany, the rise of industry and nation-states, and the machinations of the Holy Alliance within the Concert of Europe, I remembered what it was like to sit happily with you in the reading room we made for ourselves. You would have chuckled with me at all the most ridiculous Metternich quotes, and we would have discussed the developments Marx never foresaw. It might have been like when you smiled at me with amusement when I came out from under the rock and started reading Noam Chomsky for the first time. There were so many sentences and ideas I wanted to share with you, but when I looked up, you were not there with me, and I would not dare to text or call you after everything that happened. All I had were the images of you sweeping ruthlessly through my mind. I saw you sitting there smiling and laughing at something I had said, questioning my own interpretation and pushing me to think differently. If only you had been there in the chair across from me, we might have mocked the extremist left- and right-wing ideologies which the facts called so mercilessly into question. Exhausted from the density of the text, I sometimes set the book down and just stared at it, incapable of contemplating what I had learned without thinking about the long days we spent alternating between reading and discussion. Those afternoons we passed together in the dorm room were like our own private seminars in which we cultivated a deeper understanding of the world. The university wasn’t enough for us; the education it provided seemed insufficient, and the romantic ideal of improving the mind for its own sake united us during a time when my depression was at its worst.
Yet we were young and unfocused. At the beginning of the year, before the sadness of a broken heart destroyed my determination to finish it, you saw me in the corner with a gigantic biography of Harry Truman, and you asked me if I was reading that on my own rather than for a class. I confirmed that I was, and you told me that self-education was among the most romantic pursuits. So later I wrote the lyrics for love songs and I told you I was learning piano. You smiled so encouragingly, your face filled with genuine enthusiasm and excitement. “Dude,” you said, “that’s so romantic.” We developed our own concept of romanticism, which seemed to involve a sense of adventure in terms of learning. Multitudes of books, languages, and musical instruments spread out before us, captivating us like the countries on a world map might dominate the consciousness of a despairing and desperate traveler who cannot decide where to go but is always on the move. The more obscure the pursuit, the more unworthy it was of market rewards, the more enticing the endeavor seemed, so that learning Icelandic on the Internet was, as you put it, “romantic as fuck” (an endeavor I quickly abandoned). Perhaps this is why we joked about a spring break trip to Kosovo when its government daringly declared its independence from Serbia in the spring of 2008. Not for the danger, but for the sense that we would be setting ourselves apart, although maybe that was only me. Those long days with you have shaped me so deeply that I no longer know what was only in my mind and what was real.
Did you even want to read Post War with me? I hope you did. But maybe it was only the idea of you that made me fantasize so fervently about the topics we would study together all on our own beyond the confining walls of the traditional classrooms. You were reading Post War before me, I think, although I don’t know whether I should trust the memory of you sitting by the candle at the window with that big book open in your lap. Maybe I made that part up in the process of romanticizing you after the end. Still I like to think about you there sometimes, your foot propped up against the window as you slowly enjoyed a chapter about left-wing European movements and terrorists in the 1970s (I read the same chapter later). And I’m sure I remember seeing you there serenely gliding through the same text that would later demand great exertion from me. Unlike me, you weren’t in a hurry; your eyes moved gently with the leisurely pace of the type of traveler who prefers to visit countries for months rather than days, and this was an approach which inspires me. You were the type to enjoy your journey through history, whereas I was (and am) the type of obsess over quantity. But it is still your supposed philosophy of slow and pleasurable learning, stretching out with the infinity of unstructured summer days coming one after the other across several decades, which I strive to emulate today. But I usually fail. I was all alone in my bedroom just across the Potomac from DC when I finally opened the same thick history book that I had purchased years before, and which you might have or might not have read while sitting near me. I read it in a week, speeding through the pages like a madman, isolated in my bedroom thinking about you for days. It was 2012. Three years had passed since our Golden Age in the small room we shared together, and one year since the end of us.
But reading Post War alone, in a city where I spent whole weekends totally alone in my apartment without setting foot outside, was nothing like reading had been with you in the room beside me. As much as any intrinsic desire to learn, it was the memory of you which gave me the drive to sustain my attention through its pages. Half a decade of transit from home to home, city to city, and country to country had worn and battered these by then; they had often followed me across the Atlantic and back again without actually being touched. Those neglected teachings only haunted me after I left you. Every time I saw the binding, I thought of you. Some part of you had possessed the book, I’m sure of it, and that’s why I could never open it, because once I finished it, the fragment of your soul which the book kept prisoner would finally escape. Yet in the process of breaking free once I did finally read it, I knew that remnants of us would at least pass through me again, so that for one final time I could feel what it was like to be your friend. And so it was that almost a year after the last time I saw you, I read it.
I thought that part of you, a mere fragment of light or of darkness, would only go far away over the years. Reading Post War, I felt, would provide me with a sense of closure. That is why I read it long into the night, making pots of coffee at one in the morning and working through the pages until the sun rose, just so I could spend one final night in your presence. But instead, the pieces of you which escaped the book’s pages simply burrowed themselves into my conception of music, language, and geography. I’ve only just recently begun very slowly learning piano, hardly picking up where I left off when I wrote those love songs, and I think of you often when I sit down at the keys. Your positive outlook and encouraging voice are there in my head when I struggle through the chords. “Dude, that’s so romantic,” you say. I never learned Icelandic, but I thought of you when I was in Reykjavik, just like your ghost was beside me during my brief time in Kosovo just a year after we dreamed up a trip there. “This whole idea started with him,” I thought to myself as I strolled through Pristine. It was partly the old dreams we shared which pushed me to learn Spanish as an adult, so that you were there in my heart while I took classes in Barcelona. And we were still friends, after all, when I finally went to Romania.
Remember? Maybe the parts of you that you left behind somehow transmitted the visions to you in some kind of bizarre manifestation of spiritual quantum mechanics. At 21, less than a year before the end, I visited Romania’s historic university town of Cluj for no other reason than to be in the place where you had spent one week. Why? So that when I returned to America after my year in Europe, I would be able to talk to you about it. I thought about you and our beloved Swedish professor while I walked along the tram tracks and glanced at the groups of pretty Romanian university girls emerging from the halls of the academies. Alone, I trekked up to the park on the hilltop overlooking the city at sunset, and there the groups of students and couples surrounded me as you told me they would. All of us took in the beauty. But what I sensed and they could not were the little pieces of your light, left behind from your own visit there almost two years earlier. These light fragments floated around invisibly but unmistakably between me and the nearby strangers. Your flesh was across the ocean, but a part of your soul was beside me watching the sunset. Inside the light lurked a prophecy that years later, approaching 30, I would develop the false memory of nostalgically walking through Cluj wishing we could still spend time together rather than savoring your continued closeness. Yet the prediction of our demise never crossed my mind. You were going to be my friend until we grew gray hair together. Nevertheless, the end is what I now think about when I see Cluj on a map. The loss of your love overtakes me when I look at my pictures from a city we never even visited together.
I thought about you when I was in Prague that year, too, because you were always going on about Vaclav Havel and the Communist armies’ brutal destruction of freedom in Czechoslovakia in 1968. Under the guidance of our beloved anti-socialist Swedish professor, we used to scoff at the Western European intellectuals who once saw something to admire about the Soviet Union. I’ve never met a tankie in real life, but even before Twitter we knew that Stalin’s lingering apologists were active on the Internet. Yet you were also on my mind there because I knew you would love that old imperial jewel of Habsburg domination over Central Europe, where a centuries-long struggle for liberty from foreigners, aristocrats, Nazis, and Communists had finally prevailed in a way which seemed destined to actually last. I am not sure if you had been Prague yet when I visited and felt your soul with me in the street, but it still came as no surprise when you decided to live there after college. You loved the idea of Eastern Europe; you were destined for it, as we both were in our own ways. The region changed us both; it’s something we will always share, even if it happened after the end. There is cause here for despair. As with Cluj, a false memory of Prague has steadily grown in my mind. It is the memory that I was once walking around Prague feeling sad about you and the demise of our friendship, which was then in full bloom but which the portents promised would one day be destroyed. It’s like I knew it then, although I didn’t. Even so, the dying process began swiftly upon my return to America, so that by the end of senior year there was nothing left but a hope we might try again someday.
Berlin is the place where I nurture the most doomed friendships and pursue the most tainted romances. It is the old Prussian capital where my connections go to die. It was always a bad idea to try and repair our friendship by meeting there when you were living in Prague and I was interning at the American embassy near Brandenburg Gate. Perhaps that is why I like to imagine prophecies and portents in Romania and the Czech Republic, as if our demise were written in the stars. It makes it easier to think that something about Berlin is what condemned us to oblivion, even though it was my own free decision to leave you standing there all alone at the shoe store in Alexanderplatz. Consumed with anger against you and unwilling to carry on with our tiresome dispute, especially after all the awful confrontations we had during our senior year of college, I simply walked off without saying a word. I abandoned you, leaving you there alone to return in isolation to your hostel, even after you had come to Berlin only to visit me.
For years I stubbornly justified this terrible decision by citing your behavior. I long considered your actions and words to be offensive enough to excuse my unforgiving response. Even today there is the temptation to think this, and yet any satisfaction I might receive from the verdict of a jury’s ruling on such a trivial matter is utterly meaningless compared to the regret I feel for having been so willing to dissolve a connection which only two years earlier had been so fulfilling and formative. This was our one and only encounter in the middle of the Continent whose history and politics had inspired us so much during the springtime of our souls’ connection. It should have been special. It was what everything in that dorm room had been building toward. The eternal severance of our bond was the result. Afterward, I would never see you again, and perhaps that is the real reason why I finally read Post War one year later at 24. It was the only way to feel again that everything was perfect between us in our dormitory again. And do you remember the people I went to hang out with after I ditched you in Alexanderplatz? I haven’t spoken with any of them in a decade. They were temporary friends, people passing through my life during my summer at the embassy, when you should have been permanent.
I’ve been an atheist for well over a decade, and I’ve scoffed at the supposedly sacred teachings of a prophet who explicitly promised Hell for anyone who did not believe in him. Yet now I find myself hoping that all the Hell stuff was added later by the bitter men who wrote the Gospels decades after Christ’s death. It was in the dorm room with you that I became an atheist, and I subjected you to lengthy lectures about the stupidity of my old religion, relishing as I did the duel rush of blasphemy and apostasy. My rage against God blinded me to that part of Christianity which I had never really internalized to begin with. I see it now. What glows brightly in the Scriptures is the most radical element of Christianity, a deep core to the religion which is no longer followed by even the most devoted subscribers of Evangelical Bibliolatry. By this I mean the core ethical teaching of love and forgiveness. Forgiveness, I have come to realize, it a profoundly radical concept, and that’s why most Christians ignore it. For many Protestants, that great moral values of love and forgiveness seem to have vanished into the more important project of protecting the nation, “God shed his grace on thee,” from liberated women, sexual deviants, and gender noncomformists. (I sense you qualifying, perhaps even disagreeing, with some of what I just said in the heated fervor of my beliefs, and I only wish I could hear your thoughts; I write it in the spirit of the spontaneous declarations I often made in our dorm).
Fear not. I still believe in the eternal darkness which awaits us after death. There is nothing to come, no Hell where we might fornicate with Romanian university girls and do drugs together while we make up for the time we lost on Earth. I was angry at you, and I chose to walk away. I selected a path without mercy, without forgiveness, without the patience of love, even after so many atheists showed all this to me after my fundamentalist days. It was a path which meant giving up on our friendship and throwing away a connection between our souls. The choice haunts me to this day; it leaves me crippled with regret. Yet still you are beside me, or at least a piece of you is, whenever I am working my way through a dense history book. I yearn for you to be next to me, I long to be able to text you, I am desperate to meet you for coffee, I think about you often when I encounter some interesting fact or tidbit. I want to look up and see your smiling face there so I can share a sentence or paragraph with you, so I can give you my interpretation and listen while you add your own complications. But I don’t see your eyes across from me, and probably I never will again. How different it would all be if I had simply chosen forgiveness.
I felt that deep regret for the first time the week I was reading Post War. It was pouring rain in DC, and I walked without an umbrella from Rosslyn to Capitol Hill. I roamed up and down the National Mall, stepping carelessly through mud and puddles, thinking about you and the friendship it was too late to fix. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I whispered with tears to the dark gray sky overhead, and then I went into the Natural History Museum. I sat silently before the wall of hominid skulls in the gallery about human evolution. I watched the little children running around beneath the Homo heidelbergensis and Homo neanderthalensis and Homo erectus and even in the shadows of the ancient hobbit people, Homo floresiensis. There they all were, our cousins and ancestors: hundreds of thousands and even millions of years worth of skulls from the fossil record, all showing the gradual ascension of mankind across an inconceivable number of generations stretching back to furry beasts living up in the treetops, and I felt more than ever before the conviction that I was nothing, that I didn’t have a soul, that I was just an animal here by fortune, with one short moment to savor, with nothing that mattered other than the love I enacted in my relationships and the way I might treat the strangers around me. There were neither second chances to come nor divinities who might intervene and save me from myself. All I had were my own choices and my sacred bonds with people like you, and I had thrown away our treasure like it was nothing. Just when my heart began again to burst from its love of you, I cursed myself there on that bench in the museum for not having chosen forgiveness.