Review

Books

Culture

Friendship

9 May 2023

6 min read

Why do we ignore the power of friendship

Elizabeth Day’s Friendaholic: Confessions of a Friendship Addict.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen.

A large group of friends sit at a crowded table and share a meal together.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash.

Elizabeth Day is a journalist, a novelist, a podcast host, a broadcaster, and a friendaholic. This isn’t a term that she uses lightly, she’s not merely delighting in some quaint wordplay here. Rather, Elizabeth has identified within herself a chronic compulsion, a psychological need, a habitual seeking out, and an emotional reliance on friendship (or, at least, what she perceived friendship to be – more on that later…)

Therefore, when she labels herself a friendship addict, she does so with every ounce of seriousness. She also describes the symptoms of her addiction with impressive levels of introspection.

‘I would get a buzz from a moment of exchange; a hit of pure friendship adrenaline. In that moment, I would feel worthwhile and liked and accepted. I wanted more of it. Then I needed more of it. Then it became something that I relied on for my own self-worth. I must be OK, the reasoning went, I’ve got so many friends.’

These intimate confessions lead Elizabeth to begin the epilogue of her book with a familiar, albeit reconfigured, turn of phrase: ‘My name is Elizabeth Day’ she writes, ‘and I’m a recovering friendaholic.’

The quality of our social life, whether it be too large or too small, has a significant impact on our mental, emotional and physical health.

Elizabeth pre-empts any criticism of what could be perceived as a ‘woe-is-me’ memoir by meeting those who may be reaching for their ‘metaphorical tiny violins’ head on. This book unashamedly takes the impact of friendship, or a lack thereof, very seriously. And so should we. Afterall, social injuries are proven to be very real and loneliness a serious determinant of health. On the opposite end of the same scale, ‘social burnouts’, which often lead to social anxiety, are becoming an epidemic, while an increasing number of mental health issues are being accredited to the profound impact of ‘toxic’ friendships. In short, it is becoming common knowledge among researchers that the quality of our social life, whether it be too large or too small, has a significant impact on our mental, emotional and physical health.

And yet, despite this - we have barely any language with which to adequately address or inspect the topic of a ‘social life’. It seems that generation after generation, we have failed to take the art of friendship seriously.

‘Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value.’

C.S. Lewis

Considering the psychology, this seems non-sensical. Why would this be?

It could be a symptom of individualism; the emphasis that our Western society places on individual success, personal goal setting and the virtue of independence. Maybe it has more to do with our inclination toward all things productive, and, to (partly) quote C.S Lewis, ‘friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value’. The other explanation could be our pre-occupation with romantic relationships, and the habit we have of idolising them over and above all other social attachments. In her book, Notes on Love, Lauren Windle powerfully reflects on this, she writes

‘maybe it’s time to stop looking for a partner who is also my ‘best friend’ and start appreciating my best friends. Maybe it’s time to stop feeling bereft of true love and realise that I already experience it. Every day.’

Whatever the reason(s) may be, we have neglected to take seriously the science of the social life, and the results of such an oversight are encapsulated in Elizabeth Day’s self-diagnosed ‘friendship addiction’, and the book that has documented it.

Elizabeth places her personal life on the altar in this book, she sacrifices the privacy of her emotional life.

Elizabeth talks us through her most formative of friendships - the long-standing and the fleeting, the nourishing and the draining, the durable and the fragile – this book is an ode to them all. She introduces us to her ghosts of friendship past and present (although, once they read of their appearance in this strikingly honest book, I do worry that a couple of her friends may slip from the latter into the former category), and does so in a way that makes you, as the reader, instinctively close the book for a moment and indulge the continual urge to reflect on the mosaic of people who have entered and exited your own life.

Elizabeth places her personal life on the altar in this book, she sacrifices the privacy of her emotional life for the purpose of speaking with powerful candour. She tells the intimate stories of how her addiction came to be, and how she has sought to feed her need for a thriving social life at her own expense. Elizabeth has offered herself up as a case-study of what inevitably happens when we don’t have the tools, the maps, or even the language with which to engage with the subject of friendship. As it turns out, friendship – the real kind – was not what she was addicted to, nor was it what she was accumulating. Rather, it was approval. It was the self-worth that she drew from the affirmation of others. If we, as a society, ensured that we were more socially-literate, perhaps Elizabeth could have identified the difference much sooner. Perhaps we all could.

As well as telling her own stories, Elizabeth weaves together insights from psychology, philosophy, history, and the experiences of others in differing contexts. This ensures that as many people as possible are able to find themselves in the pages of this book. And, as a result, I found Friendaholic to be the book that I didn’t know I had been missing.

It’s funny. It’s emotive. It’s generous. It’s honest. And it’s refreshingly serious about friendship. I recommend it heartily.

Nobody is totally immune to cultural individualism, the idol of productivity, nor the heroizing of romantic love.

There’s just one thing that felt missing, one insight that I instinctively began to fill any gaps with. I found myself willing Elizabeth to take a biblical route (totally unfairly, I should add, as she doesn’t identify as a Christian, nor does she claim this to be a book of any religious inclination).

I wanted her to explore the Bible, because in it, she would find an abundance of evidence for almost every point she felt compelled to make. Friendship soaks the pages of the Christian Bible.

Friendaholic quotes Jesus in its very first chapter, making reference to his declaration that ‘greater love has no one than this, that someone lay his life down for his friends’, but then never picks this astonishing claim, nor the history-altering man that it came from, up again (once again- this is no criticism, if it were, it would be a mightily unfair one). The platonic love that Elizabeth takes so seriously, and that our culture doesn’t take nearly seriously enough, is claimed to be the ‘greater’ love by Jesus, who subsequently kick-started a movement which was defined by this kind of love. Friendship was weaved into the earliest expressions of what we now call Christianity/the church. Jesus’ words were, and still are, lived out with astonishing impact.

This is not to say that Christians always perceive or do friendship perfectly. On the contrary, nobody is totally immune to cultural individualism, the idol of productivity, nor the heroizing of romantic love. Indeed, the afore mentioned quote by Lauren Windle has been taken from a book where she tells the story of ‘being single in a marriage obsessed church’.

It’s for this reason that I so enjoyed Elizabeth’s offering. Friendaholic felt like a literary dusting brush, brushing aside generations worth of dirt from a long-neglected jewel; the jewel being real, true, and deep friendship. The kind of friendship that is as integral to our health as food and shelter, the kind that was included in the original blueprint for human flourishing, the kind that is both dramatically underrated, and yet greater than all other human loves.

You can take it from an ancient book, or Elizabeth Day’s brand new one – as it turns out, they will tell you the exact same thing.

Review

Awe and wonder

Books

Culture

Poetry

10 October 2024

6 min read

Charles Taylor on how poetry seeks cosmic connections

The philosopher yields an array of luminous insights.

Paul Weston

Paul Weston is a Fellow at Ridley Hall, Cambridge.

At dusk, three people sit on a field edge and look at the stars emerging.

Rad Pozniakov on Unsplash.

Charles Taylor, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment

At just shy of 600 pages, philosopher Charles Taylor’s latest book is not for the faint-hearted. At the heart of the book are fascinating questions. What kind of language should we use when we encounter ‘beauty’, or experience ‘wonder’ which seems to take us into a new kind of space, or make time stand still? It could be the sight of a breathtaking landscape. It could be a piece of music. It’s that sense of ‘connection’ with something bigger than ourselves. What might it mean? More particularly, how do we express what we intuitively feel to be real and deeply significant about such things when our usual language fails to capture it?

Taylor says that his latest book ‘is about (what I see as) the human need for cosmic connection . . . one shot through with joy, significance, inspiration’. And his hypothesis is that ‘the desire for this connection is a human constant, felt by (at least some) people in all ages and phases of human history’, even if ‘the forms this desire takes have been very different in the succeeding phases and stages of this history’. The book explores these questions by focusing on late-Romantic European poetry and traces its development through the work of later poets including Goethe, Rilke, Wordsworth, Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot.

The background to Taylor’s explorations is the ongoing impact of the Enlightenment on our language and understanding about ‘truth’ and ‘meaning’. Those familiar with his 2007 book A Secular Age will find echoes of it here, particularly the way in which post-Enlightenment language tended to develop the language of control. This, he argues, became increasingly dominant in Western modernity ‘because it is linked to a practical stance which is basically instrumentalist; we seek out the efficient causal relations in our world with the aim of discovering handles which will enable us to realise our purposes’. In reaction to this narrowing of possibilities, the Romantic poets focused on ‘the experience of connection, and the empowerment this brings: not a power over things, but one of self-realization’. And a key element of the Romantic movement was the recognition that a poem (alongside the wider arts) uncovers deeper meanings: it ‘reveals to us, brings us into contact with, a deep reality which would otherwise remain beyond our ken’.

‘Poetry goes beyond creating a mood, an atmosphere of feeling, and claims to give access to the inner force in a thing, not by describing it, but by making it palpable’

Charles Taylor

The book focuses on the variety of forms that this reaction took amongst Romantic poets. A unifying desire for ‘connection’ led to differing ideas about how poetic language makes this possible and what kinds of meaning are revealed. But the central belief remained constant: that poetic language was the key to addressing a prevailing cultural atmosphere of ‘disenchantment’, in which the desire for cosmic connection had been sidelined.

On the English side of the channel, Taylor finds in Keats’ poetry, a new form of expression summed up in his statement ‘Beauty is Truth and Truth Beauty’. In Taylor’s words, ‘Art raises the object to a new unity and intensity, which constitutes Beauty. But this is not something which just exists in the mind of the artist (or reader); it has reality, and hence Truth, even though this reality is partly brought to fruition by artistic (re)creation’.

Similarly, for Gerard Manley Hopkins, the form of poetic language itself can become a means of ‘connection’. As Taylor puts it, in Hopkins’ work, ‘Poetry goes beyond creating a mood, an atmosphere of feeling, and claims to give access to the inner force in a thing, not by describing it, but by making it palpable’. His poetry embodies this in that it ‘renders the rhythms of the being itself through the “sprung rhythm” of the verse’.

The second half of the book looks to poets of the last 200 years who have navigated parallel pathways towards this ideal of experienced fullness – in the face of increasing industrialisation and disenchantment. Baudelaire longs for the experience of fullness, but finds it barred by a state of melancholy that he described as ‘Spleen’. It is a melancholy brought about by the endless repetitions of mundane and urbanised life. Baudelaire’s attempt to find release from our imprisonment in trapped time is to face Spleen head on and to transform it through poetic contemplation.

T. S. Eliot’s poetry similarly aims to evoke the sources of a fuller life in a culture of decay by means of the ‘continual surrender’ of the poet to something more significant and valuable. In Eliot’s case this resolves in a more-or-less traditional sense of Christian order, but Taylor notes that his poetry doesn’t necessarily require this. Miłosz on the other hand, amidst the social and political upheavals in Poland, sought a higher form of poetry: a poetry that could rise above the discord of social turmoil in order to define a moment and clarify the path that needed to be taken.

‘The work of art opens for us a new field of meaning, by giving shape to it’.

Charles Taylor

At times, the weight and detail of Taylor’s exposition threatens to overwhelm the reader, but he offers an array of luminous insights along the way, and he is largely successful in keeping an eye on the broader questions and themes. Perhaps the most important here is his belief that the human desire for ‘cosmic connection’, with its yearning for joy, significance and inspiration is perennial. The book is in this sense an elaborate historical worked example of this desire, understood – perhaps imperceptibly – as a sense of ‘loss’ or ‘longing’. It is this ‘central aspiration of the Romantic period’, he concludes, that ‘remains powerful today’.

My own experiences of talking with people today seems to amply confirm Taylor’s view. And the search for language to describe the desire for this sense of connection (or the longing for it) continues to thrive even within a so-called secularised culture (most likely because of it). It too seeks language for expression and sometimes struggles for some of the same reasons that the Romantics identified. Taylor’s phrase ‘the immanent frame’ (from his A Secular Age) powerfully evokes a sense of being held on a restricted rein, unable to name or explore the realms of ‘beauty’ or the ‘transcendent’ beyond perceived cultural boundaries. Connected to this is the still commonly held belief that any supposed knowledge derived through the arts doesn’t put us in touch with anything other than ourselves.

Taylor convincingly transcends the supposed dichotomy between these so-called ‘subjective’ or on the other hand, ‘ontological’ possibilities. ‘The work of art’, he says, ‘opens for us a new field of meaning, by giving shape to it’. Moreover, it can ‘realize a powerful experience of fulfillment . . . of connection which empowers’. And Taylor backs his theory with autobiography. In Goethe’s ‘Wanderer Nachtlied’, he says, ‘There is a kind of rest/peace which I long for. I don’t fully understand it, but now I have some sense of it’. Or broadening the artistic field, he finds that listening to Chopin’s Fantasie-Impromptu in C sharp minor ‘opens me up to an unnameable longing’, or that when he listens to Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, he feels ‘a striving upwards, an expression of praise and thanks, straining to reach some higher addressee (for me, this would be God), but I can imagine that someone else, feeling the ascending movement, would imagine another destination’).

Here then is a book that shines a light on the possibilities of ‘cosmic connection’. Taylor affirms our desires, reassuring us that we should not feel strange to share the same longings for ‘fullness’, for ‘transcendence’, for ‘joy’ and for ‘connection’ as did the Romantic poets. Our recognition of these desires may well have been evoked by the kind of poetry or music that Taylor talks about here. But for all of us, it is good to be reminded that in a western world still heavily influenced by the climate of secularisation many today are still searching for the sense of cosmic connection that Taylor describes.

Charles Taylor’s Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment is published by Harvard University Press.