what_we_should_have_had unhinged "How many we see in the street, or sit with in church, whom, though silently, we warmly rejoice to be with! Read the language of these wandering eye-beams. The heart knoweth. ... Our intellectual and active powers increase with our affection. ... The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed: there is no winter, and no night: all tragedies, all ennuis vanish, -- all duties even; nothing fills the proceeding eternity but the forms all radiant of beloved persons. ... Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine -- a possession for all time. ... The good spirit of our life has no heaven which is the price of rashness. Love, which is the essence of God, is not for levity, but for the total worth of man. ... **** I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with the roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frostwork, but the solidest thing we know. For now, after so many ages of experience, what do we know of nature, or of ourselves? Not one step has man taken toward the solution of the problem of his destiny. In one condemnation of folly stand the whole universe of men. But the sweet sincerity of joy and peace, which I draw from this alliance with my brother's soul, is the nut itself whereof all nature and all thought is but the husk and shell. **** ... **** There are two elements that go to the composition of friendship, each so sovereighn, that I can detect no superiority in either, no reason why either should be first named. One is Truth. A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and my deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness, with which one chemical atom meets another. Sincerity is the luxury allowed, like diadems and authority, only to the highest rank, that being permitted to speak truth, as having none above it to court or conform unto. Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins. We parry and fend the approach of our fellow man by compliments, by gossip, by amusements, by affairs. We cover up our thought from him under a hundred folds. **** ... **** But a friend is a sane man who exercises not my ingenuity but me. My friend gives me entertainment without requiring any stipulation on my part. A friend, therefore, is a sort of paradox in nature. I who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my being in all its height, variety and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form; so that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature. The other element of friendship is Tenderness. We are holden to men by every sort of tie, by blood, by pride, by fear, by hope, by lucre, by lust, by hate, by admiration, by every circumstance and badge and trifle, but we can scarce believe that so much character can subsistin another as to draw us by love. Can another be so blessed, and we so pure, that we can offer him tenderness? When a man becomes dear to me, I have touched the goal of fortune. I find very little written directly to the heart of this matter in books. And yet I have one text which I cannot choose but remember. My author says, -- "I offer myself faintly and bluntly to those whose I effectually am, and tender myself least to him to whom I am the most devoted." I wish that friendship should have feet, as well as eyes and eloquence. It must plant itself on the ground, before it vaults over the moon. **** ... It is for the aid and comfort through all the relations and passages of life and death. It is fit for serene days, and graceful gifts, and country rambles, but also for rough roads and hard fare, shipwreck, poverty, and persecution. ... Let him not cease an instant to be himself. The only joy I have in his being mine, is that the NOT MINE is MINE. ... Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo. ... We talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected. Reverence is a great part of it. Treat your friends as a spectacle. ... Leave this touching and clawing. Let him be to me a spirit. A message, a thought, a sincerity, a glance from him, I want, but not news, nor pottage. ... Guard him as thy counterpart. ... The only reward of virtue, is virtue: the only way to have a friend, is to be one. ... A friend is Janus-faced: he looks to the past and the future. He is the child of all my foregoing hours, the prophet of those to come, and the harbinger of a greater friend. ... In the great days, presentiments hover before me in the firmament. I ought then to dedicate myself to them. I go in that I may seize them, I go out that I may seize them. I fear only that I may lose them receding into the sky in which now they are only a patch of brighter light. ... It is truen, next week I shall have languid moods, when I can well afford to occupy myself with foreign objects; then I shall regret the lost literature of your mind, and wish you were by my side again. ... So I will owe to my friends this evanescent intercourse. I will receive from them not what they have, but what they are. They shall give me that which properly they cannot give, but which emanates from them. ... It is thought a disgrace to love unrequited. But the great will see that true love cannot be unrequited. True love transcends the unworthy object, and dwells and broods on the eternal, and when the poor, interposed mask crumbles, it is not sad, but feels rid of so much earth, and feels its independency the surer. Yet these things may hardly be said without a sort of treachery to the relation. The essence of friendship is entireness, a totally of magnanimity and trust." Friendship, Ralph Waldo Emerson i looked to the past and saw that we had no future. there was no entireness, no trust. you do not exist anymore. 020602 ... erinicolejax We should have been so beautiful together. 020602 ... silentbob twisted entangled entwined enveloped together forever until the stars burn out 020602 ... blown cherry What we should have had, what might have been if you just could...but you can't, would have been utopia. But such perfection is not allowed to exist in a world such as ours. 020602 ... jessicafletcher for that statement, silentbob, i think you are beautiful. 020712 ... drstrangelove seen a great movie about ~~~ called 'total eclipse' starring leonardo dicaprio. poignant and relevant. specially to me. its starting to look like what_we_should_have_had can only exist in eternity for beings such as us. 020712 ... josie Less drunk. Time. Fewer clothes. Another phone call. Not so many other people in our lives. Confidence. Better ways to understand each other. More songs. Sunrises. Patience. Empathy. Places to hang out other than Blather. A plan. 220315 what's it to you? who go blather from