L IS FOR FRIENDHIP?

“Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.”
 - Sigmund Freud

Freud looked troubled at me.  "We have reached L -- what comes to mind at that?"

"Lord of the Rings," I said.

Freud groaned in disappointment.  "A mere entertainment of the cinema?"

"No, it was more than merely a movie" I said.  

"The three movies are a moving testimony to the saving grace of true friendship."

"Bah! Friendship, as I define it, plays a key role between individuals to the extent 

that it appears as a metaphor for those relationships between two people that, unlike the state of romantic love, lead to a broader form of unity."

Mark Twain wrinkled his face as if
 he had bitten into a lemon as Freud when on.  

"In this sense, I connect it with these other ties that are based on the aim-inhibited sexual impulses: 

the tender relationship between parent and child, and conjugal love in which the sexual relationship has gradually fallen into second place."

Freud played with his unlit cigar.  

"These two bonds form the basis for the broader unity that is constituted by the family, 

just as friendship is the foundation for the creation of social ties."

Mark Twain snorted, 

"All that fancy talk gave my brain the whim-wams! 

When we think of friends, and call their faces out of the shadows, and their voices out of the echoes that murmur along the corridors of memory, 

and do it without knowing why, save that we love to do it,

 we prove that friendship is a Reality, and not a Fancy--

that it is built upon a rock, and not upon the sands that dissolve away with the ebbing tides and carry their monuments with them."

Freud said, "You are a sentimentalist.  I am a scientist." 

"And a mighty cold-blooded one, Coke Head.  

The proper office of a friend is to side with you when you are in the wrong. Nearly anybody will side with you when you are in the right."

Mark lit a cigar and blew the smoke into the granite face of Freud. 

 "Why, the holy passion of Friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime ... 

if not asked to lend money."