Sulle Ali degli Amici
Starting with considerations of our times, populated by a fragmentation of friendship because of social medias, and so a lot of contacts with which we interact in a daily base but that we can't call friends in the most profound meaning of it, we are re-directed thanks to the author in the old Greek world and the meaning of friendship for Socrates, who lived a lot of time before Christ.
As maybe you will remember the philosopher was killed in Athen for various reasons.
Socrates didn't avoid his end; he embraced death with joy and enthusiasm.
While his disciples tried all their best for saving his existence, Socrates was upset, because although the profound friendship that he had with these young men, they didn't understand his point of view, the desire of dying in his city, and they were not grade to see that departure in this way; after all, for Socrates, the best thing to do.
Leaving Athen would have meant in fact to him an outrageous gesture; Athens was his city and there, he would have lost his existence. Socrates asked to his friends to enter more deeply in connection with him, his soul, for accepting and maybe admiring his choice.
Why friendship is so important?
Because it put in connection the most diversified souls. Yes: it is not important who we are, where we live, if we are rich or poor, tall of short, beauty or ugly, a friend won't see that treats, but the missing part of his/her character and so a sparkle of that part still lacking in his/her soul and this attraction means that the person is ready to discover a new soul and wants to create a relationship of friendship.
That's why friendship and friends are so important for the existence of an individual.
Oh: real friendship of course can also live moments of interruptions, because each of the individuals involved in the relationship can know moments of standby, but wherever there will be a friend, this friend will remain devoted to the other soul that he/she is not hearing or seeing at the moment.
Socrates once met in a gymnasium some teengars and they started to ask him who a friend is and how to define the word of friendship.
Socrates doesn't think that a friend should be so close to the personality of the other one (I agree!) because it's in the differentiations that we create a solid friendship, not in being similars.
Of course similarities can be important and sharing the past, sharing common experiences, scholastic ones etc is absolutely important and remarkable but it doesn't mean at all that these experiences can help to build a solid friendship. Friendship is a territory completely different; an exploration of the other one.
Friends are priorities, joys, differentiations, sometimes they change our perspective of seeing the reality and vice versa.
I hadn't never understood the theory of beauty told by Socrates. I admit that to me remained a mystery per decades and also when I went to my ex institute as a reporter for interviewing students at the end of their course, they always told me of the "Idea of Beauty transmitted by the school." Honestly to me it didn't say anything, but to them it was central.
For once, in this book, I received a beautiful explanation of this word.
Friend is synonime of beauty, tells Socrates.
Classifying friendship or beauty is impossible because there are no parameters.
The author compares beauty to light.
Beauty is in grade, being not reachable, to escape away, but at the same time it illuminates the world and our existence.
When we see a beautiful painting, a landscape, a sunset particularly attractive, we say that it is beauty isn't it true?
The beauty is a characteristic, of course untouchable and not physical, typical of the world and things that surround our daily existence; but wait: to Socrates beauty is lived differently, in a more physical way: it's indispensible to give humanity and shape to beauty, thanks to our connections, building beautiful relationships and friendships.
It could happen also when we impact tremendously with a city rich of culture. I remember that when I visited the last time Florence, I cried several times for the joy of being there and seeing and visiting all that beauty, immense treasure of culture, sculptures, paintings, and the immensity value given at the city by people from all over the world and the meaning that all of it meant: immortality.
Generations after generations I read wagons of tales of known and unknown people in our beautiful Italy.
For the author, Fiesta by Ernest Hemingway mean the beauty and richness of Spain in the 1920s and the personal probems of the protagonist Jake Barnes in love with Brett Ashley.
Michel de Montaigne said once: "I don't know best school for the existence than presenting to people the diversifications of other many existences, opinions, customs..." It's indispensible to open the horizons, to look not just our little garden, but at the immensity, complexity of the world surrounding us.
This book at the moment has a crucial importance considering the ugliness of the world where we live in.
A black man was killed in the USA, and turmoils and manifestations for a different world, for a world of peace, for a world without any other discrimination, started to take place in the entire country. It also meant destructions, it also meant disorders. It's...ugly. Violence is ugly.
Beauty in this sense is seeing like the possibility of building a new world, a peaceful world, a world where dialogue will be the priority, and where serenity, joy, and cooperation for a better life of the various individuals, a priority.
Beautiful things are re-connected with our friends. It's a return, writes the author, like it was for Ulysses his return to Itaca once completed his trip.
Friendship means setting us free from the logic of opportunism tells Aristotle; and acting in this way, continues Aristotle means also to be best citizens.
Aristotle interconnected policy with friendship. To him acting pressed by a friend in the society means bettering the world in a beautiful modality where opportunism doesn't exist.
Utility: Aristotle thinks that who act well doesn't think opportunistically and this one is the first step for building happy people and a happy society.
Aristotle divided the various friendships: the useful one, the edonistic one, but friendship is never divided by the polis, and it is its cement. For polis, old greek imagined the social tissue of the city.
Michel de Montaigne, in 1550s met Etienne de La Boétie, and they became pretty great friends. In common they shared their love for classic studies.
Montaigne would have written later that to his point of view, there is not a sentiment more profound than the one of friendship and that there is no comparison with other feelings. Plus, he added that relatives can't never be lived as friends. So the relationship between a mother and a child, a father and a child or also the love-story of a couple can't be absolutely compared to the beauty, intense relationship of a friendship.
Friends are free and they act freely.
Then, said once Socrates, there are special people: people with the sparkle of freedom and immensity once tasted when they danced in the sky with some Gods. These souls are special ones because their corporeity won't never permit them in this phase of flying away but they can do that in many different ways. They are special individuals still in grade to see the immensity discovered before.
A book this one important for our times, so tribulated. It permit to read our reality pretty well. It is clear and explicative.
I thank Marsilio for the physical copy of this book.
Anna Maria Polidori
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