Sunday 8 November 2009

What is the measure of a friend?

Finally I have bowed to the increasing pressure of friends and circumstance and joined Facebook.
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Having done so I am faced with the question of friendship ... people are being recommended to me as friends ... worse still, I am being recommended to others. It seems impolite to refuse someone who wants to be a friend ... but do I want to be friends with everyone on the planet who has a tangential connection to two other people I once knew? Is this friendship? Are these people for whom I would lay down my life ... would they reciprocate?
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I want to value the friends I have (on Facebook and in real life) but like love, I wonder do we debase the meaning of friendship by using it so lightly.

I am reminded of Emily Dickinson

"My friends are my estate.
Forgive me then the avarice to hoard them.
They tell me those who were poor early have different views of gold.
I don't know how that is.
God is not so wary as we,
else He would give us no friends,
lest we forget Him."



Mmmm.

3 comments:

Louise Polhill said...

Now I feel bad for being friendly... but then we were told in a lecture today that networking is a very postmodern trait. So there we go.

Tim said...

A quick search reveals 74 Craig Gardiners. Interestingly none of them reveals enough information for me to be sure it's you. Which raises the interesting question of whether you can become friends with someone before you know them.
Anyway - how about giving us enough information to make an intellegent guess at which one is you?

Craig Gardiner said...

Tim where are you searching?]Facebook?
The picture on facebook and on the blog should tally (roughly one is from Scotland and the other form Iceland but they are both me))that and the fact that i've just now started to import the blog into facebook.