This type of trangression, at least to this extreme, is rare, and I wondered if they were rare enough that I could go twenty or thirty years without having had any acquaintance with such a real world instance, otherwise only known in soap operas, literature, and movies, and music, and well, so pervasive in art, but seemingly so perverse as to not be admitted in real life as it is lived.
No doubt we have all been acquainted with seeming friends that take advantage and, depending upon the scale of the offense compared to the offset of other pleasures, we dismiss said person from our company, or perhaps deign to indulge their quirks, with but, from time to time, a pique of annoyance or even outright smack down when we feel “they have gone too far.”
Overtime, too I think, friends build boundaries of the acceptable and not-to-be accepted. Inherent in such fence building is a significant granting and accepting of trust: Trust to offend and trust to forgive, and trust to be forgiven and even offended. Is this perhaps the true meaning of Frost’s friend and neighbor “fences make good neighbors.”
Such a state of tension in building a friendship entails no small amount of trial and error, and trial-and-error, you and I both know, is at minimum a vigorous undertaking that is likely far more taxing at the onset than the initially remitted reward, and perhaps, likely? the burden will not be shared equally. This last I think owes to the reason that for many of us our greatest friendships are established early in life, or at the least, serves as valuable instruction when and if new friendships of the meaningful sort are made available later in life. At any rate forged friendships early in life are a blessing; it is a distinct benefit to have company on the road well traveled, or for that matter, on the one less so.
The betrayal Sandra Camille Powers engaged in was worse than tragic, she is no Brutus, and more certainly she does not play in the common comedic plots of betrayal found in Friends or Seinfeld. Hers is an actual betrayal of form. She betrays the very structure of friendship. A Venus flytrap if you will, or those weird fish in Nature films that lure by obfuscation.
Of course such ensnarement depends on a suspension of our natural caution and wariness: self-preservation for most of us is really important: Rightfully so to my thinking.
And the lure that mimics is hinted at in this aphorism found in an essay “Of Friendship” by Montaigne: “And Aristotle says that good legislators have had more care for friendship than for justice.” Without that word “good,” I think we can agree, that little line would be very problematic, but with it, is very promising.
Montaigne idealizes friendship to an extraordinarily exclusionary relationship, if not pure absolutism. As he talks about the blending of souls that we might recognize better as the bond of marriage, we can agree with the affect if though differing with his exactness. Besides he was writing in the late 1500’s, and though raised in the newly emerging humanist idiom, the blending of three into one reality was sharply impressed on all thinking members of society, to such degree I imagine that any expression of understood perfection would express itself in just those terms.
Be that as it may, the point is taken that in our friends, and I would hope in all our families as well, that we feel as much and more joy, in the joy, of our friends, but unfortunately feel as much or more sorrow, in the sorrow, of our friends. Otherwise, we aren’t communicating with friends, but making “associations that are forged and nourished by pleasure or profit, by public or private needs…” These associations I would say are the bread and butter of society and have intrinsic use, but friends says our friend Montaigne, “our free will has no product more properly its own than affections and friendship.”
And of this which we call friendship, in some part lies, as in love, our need to be willing to give advice and instruction when and where asked if it is in our power; and concurrently, be willing to receive advice and instruction as we are then able to receive. Those who share in this are truly friends and truly blessed.