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Each friend is indeed a world, a special sphere of certain emotions, experiences, memories, and qualities of personality. Each friend takes us into a world that is ourselves as well. We are all made up of many worlds and each friendship brings one or more of those worlds to life. Friendship "constellates" (the word means "an arranging of stars") one's universe of meaning and value. One shares with a friend a unique way of looking at life and experiencing it, and so our friendships perform a kind of astrology of the soul, opening planetary worlds for us, to give our lives culture and articulation. To lose a friend is to suffer the loss of worlds, and to be lacking in friendship altogether is to be cut off, in a deeply felt way, from a richly self-defining way of being in the world.
If the body is in pain, one of the first things to look for is infection; if the soul is in pain, we might look for lack of friendship. Friendship creates the cosmologies in which we lie, and if we do not have a cultivated world made through the conversations and exchanges of friendship, we will necessarily feel detached, unmoored, and unplaced. We may believe that friendship, like so many things of the soul, is tangential to life, an added boon, or an accessory. But if we were to take
Epicurus, Ficino, Thomas Mann, Emily Dickinson, and many other writers at their word, we would realize that friendship is a necessity. If we neglect it, we will feel its lack as a morbidity of soul. Friendship makes a major contribution to the process of soul-making, and without it we feel a painful lack and a debilitating weakness of heart.
-- Thomas Moore, Soul Mates
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