The Paris Review

Philia, the root of Philadelphia, roughly translates to “friendship” in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, an enduring source for understanding the ethics of friendship. Aristotle identifies three essential bases for friendship: utility, pleasure, and virtue. Friendships of virtue, Aristotle believes, are ideal because only they are based on recognition.

When I was thirty, I moved back to Philadelphia. I had only been gone a few years, and though I knew better, I had half expected it to be just as I’d left it. It was not: most of my friends had left the city altogether or moved, married, to the edges of town. Occasionally, I would run into people I had once known, encounters that produced deep and surprising embarrassment in me; unexplained life choices digested in fast, always alienating, appraisal. The more unsettling thing was that my close friendships were changing, too.

Friendship has never seemed both more important and less relevant than it does now. The concept surfaces primarily when we worry over whether our networked lives impair the quality of our connections, our community. On a nontheoretical level, adult friendship is its own puzzle. The friendships we have as adults are the intentional kind, if only because time is short. During this period, I began to consider the subject. What is essential in friendship? Why do we tolerate difference and distance? What is the appropriate amount to give? And around this same time, I discovered the curious, decades-long friendship between the writers Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, and the sculptor Wharton Esherick. Their relationship seemed to me model in some ways; they were friends for over twenty years, mostly living in different cities. Each man was dedicated to pursuing his own line of work, and the insecurities and single-mindedness of ambition seemed analogous too to the ways that adulthood can separate us from our friends.

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Benjamin Franklin's daily schedule.

I recently turned thirty, the age by which, according to William James, “the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.” But he wrote that in 1890, before mobile devices and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and Lana Del Rey and the fragmentation of the self, and I’m happy to report that my character is as soft as unhandled Play-Doh. For the past year I’ve slept mostly in well-worn twin beds generously provided by writing colonies, my life a new kind of nomadism made possible by America’s patrons of the arts. Every morning I get up at seven, or seven thirty, or eight, or eleven, and record my dreams, or forget them, then make my bed, or not, after which I proceed immediately to take a shower, or start the coffee, or eat breakfast, or go for a walk, then sit down at my desk to begin the day’s work, or write e-mails, or stare out the window, or do absolutely anything else. I usually end my day by reading a book, or talking on the phone, or watching basketball highlights on ESPN.com, or wondering why I keep the channel on Jimmy Fallon when every instance of empty enthusiasm makes me loathe him a little more.

William James again: “There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding, or regretting, of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all. If there be such daily duties not yet ingrained in any one of my readers, let him begin this very hour to set the matter right.” This very hour.

Habits are for squares, is what I’ve always felt. Read More »

John Haskell. Photo by Ryan Field.

John Haskell, Dec. 13, 2011. Sparks Steak House, East Forty-sixth Street.

John and I met for dinner at Sparks Steak House on East Forty-sixth Street. He was writing a piece on city restaurants where mobsters have been gunned down. Sparks has fine steaks but an even finer history of murder under its front awning. (Mob boss Paul Castellano and his guard were shot out front by mobsters wearing white trench coats and black Russian ushanka hats.) I live on West Forty-sixth, so I walked through Times Square and crossed a few more avenues to the restaurant. I passed through the thirty-year-old murder scene out front, came inside, and a rambunctious party filled the reception area. John was already there, in the middle of the party. He waved me his way and we were shown to our table.

John Haskell: I was walking down the street, singing some Christmas carol, like a Nat King Cole thing ...

Gian: Out loud?

JH: Yeah, kind of singing, people walking around. The weather’s nice, it’s Christmas time, and I was feeling happy. Happiness is appreciation. I think appreciation has something to do with the fact that you’re going to die. It’s like, “This is life, and it’s going to be over, but this is the moment now.”

Talking around the idea of happiness is holy stuff. Its definition and how to attain it is what Aristotle would ask of Plato in a dusty Athenian salon thousands of years ago. But today, happiness is rarely a topic of discussion outside of a therapist’s office or a sorority dorm room. To be happy, we have learned, we must also be naive. Read More »