The Pleasures of Acquaintance

EMERSON.

FAR be it from my pen to dim the glory of friendship, which all the poets of all the ages have sung so sweetly; and yet I dare maintain that of the two degrees of social intercourse, acquaintance and friendship, a slight and evanescent acquaintance is the more ideal, and possesses a superior pungency of flavor. I love my friends with a peculiar extravagance of affection which has only deepened with the shifting of the perspective from girlhood to womanhood. Also, I know these friends of mine, and furthermore, forgive them. I steel my heart against the biting frankness of one; I overlook another’s dislike of poetry; and I respond, with varying success, to the warm and effusive nature of a third. All this I do for the sake of friendship — that affinity of soul which draws us together, and lends to our intercourse its tender, deep and permanent quality. Because of this permanence and depth — because we shall return, again and again, to a friend’s heart, as to the warm fireside of the home — because of the sympathy and love that burns always there, we willingly forego many things. If friendship demands great sacrifices, it repays them all with this feeling of confidence and security. With those whom I account my best and dearest, there is no reserve. Our friendship is rooted in the bed-rock of intimacy.

Unlike Emerson, I go to my friend’s house; I know his father, mother, and sisters; ‘a thought, a message, a sincerity,’my friendship may be to me; but it is infinitely more, for it bears the indelible stamp of concreteness. It is interwoven through and through with many problems of morality and conduct. It is in no sense abstract, for it holds too many threads of reality; nor is it ideal, for a number of those threads are broken, and tangled, and imperfect. I fancy that friendship is like an exquisite pattern embroidered on a coarse cloth. The embroidery, with its fair colors and graceful design, has become a part of the fabric, and is so intermingled with the uncouth texture that the One cannot be ripped from the other without marring both.

Now, acquaintance is almost the exact opposite of this. All that is impossible in friendship is possible in acquaintance. Acquaintance resembles a bit of bright silk raveling caught lightly in the mesh of the cloth. Without injury to the fabric, you may pull out the raveling and see it lying there in the palm of your hand. It is abstract, simple, ideal, ephemeral. It is not interwoven with necessity or sordidness. It rests upon the top of the affections, lightly; and therefore, I say, it possesses a certain keenness of pleasure that friendship, welling up from the depths, cannot know.

Acquaintance offers the fairest of all opportunities — that of idealizing one’s self. With the formation of an acquaintance, there comes into my life a stranger from another world. Can I not be to this man or woman something finer than I know myself to be? According to the mood I am in, can I not, for one half-hour, sparkle with wit, or show myself gracious and kind, or thrash out that philosophical dispute without binding myself to everlasting observance of the principles I have laid down? I can be a boon companion, a literator, an optimist, a pessimist. To an acquaintance, I can reveal what side of my nature I will. I can show him the red apples that lie on the top of the measure. The little, knotty fruit below will remain hidden from his eyes, unless, indeed, we should become friends. And then? Ah! then, he will forgive me. But, for the present, I am ideal, and there is no need for forgiveness.

Not only do I thus abstract my better self from the grossness and complexity of my entire nature, but I converse with an idealized companion. He, too, — be he girl or boy, man or woman, — sketches for me an outline of his beatified self. He displays his most lovable side. If he has unfortunate habits, I am not unaware of them. If his jokes are a mere stock-in-trade, and his few theories of philosophy worn threadbare with hard use, I have not time to find him out. It is not my purpose to play the detective, but to gather what delight I may from my brief converse with this chance acquaintance. He may be the veritable black sheep of his family; or, worse, he may be that unfortunate, lone, white creature in a tribe of dusky fleeces. These things are as nought to me. His dogmatic father, his scapegoat of a brother, his pedantic sister — these I know not. Only the man himself, the best part of him, such as he has chosen to give me in our brief acquaintanceship — that I know, and in that I take delight.

This pleasure in mere acquaintance is one of the charms of life for all who love the touch-and-go of daily intercourse. It is a sort of luxury, over and above the enduring friendships which demand great sacrifices in return for their great happiness. Friendship drags, in consequence, all the joys and woes of the universe. It frequently displays deformities, scars, and ugly places, which we prefer to hide and cover over. But acquaintance is an ideal, starlike point of friendship, no part of which one could wish to forget.

You who are staunch and loyal friends, who have toiled and suffered and shed your heart’s tears and sacrificed untold things to keep alive that flower of friendship, be not offended. I would not, for the sum-total of my acquaintances, forego the least of my good friends. But when I look backward, and, like a miser, count up the moments of human intercourse that have given me great pleasure, the starry points of many an acquaintanceship shine out so clear and bright that I must count them as no mean portion of my wealth. They have been precious moments in my life; and