• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 909 0

did not immediately say, and MacMurrough conjectured that the family was more easily governed. Certainly friendship had its political implications and Scrotes was able to advance instances of friends who had effected risings and revolts against despots and bullies. Tyrants, so Plato said, stand in awe of friends. The question then arose: was friendship incidental or essential to these actions? MacMurrough inclined to the latter view; for friendship, he maintained, tending to the good of both friends, by extension might seek the good of all. Scrotes wondered might the same not be said of families? From this proposition MacMurrough dissented, discovering as he spoke what seemed to him the differentia of those two institutions: the one, being generative, must seek its interest against the competitive generation of others; the other, owning no posterity, was free of such claims. Might we then say, asked Scrotes, that the virtues advanced by two such differing institutions should themselves be different?

—It seems we very well might, MacMurrough replied.

And it was pleasant to speak of such things while on their windy prominence they sat. Below, the boys thithered and thenced to the raft and back. Three times, four times, five times, six. Like mating ducks they swam: parallel but one slightly ahead.

—And if it be the case that the one has subsumed the other, Scrotes continued, might we not then infer that the virtues advanced by the one are more in kilter with the times than the virtues advanced by the other?

—It seems inevitable that we should, said MacMurrough.

—What, then, are the virtues advanced by friendship?

MacMurrough replied that they were surely divers and legion; but that the cardinal virtue of friendship must be selflessness. That quality, he maintained, was exampled in all the heroic friendships, but for its cynosure he chose Castor and Pollux, opining that greater love hath no man than this, that Pollux laid down his immortality for his friend. He touched on the loyalty of Damon and Pythias and lightly glanced on Sergius and Bacchus and other couplings of the Christian calendar who had found in their friendship the fortitude to accept their martyrs’ crowns. Of the Sacred Band of Thebes he spoke, which at Chaeronea fell, each friend by his lover’s side, and told how Philip of Macedon had wept for such valor, pledging through his candid tears, “Woe unto them who think evil of such men.” Of Achilles and Patroclus he naturally spoke, of Pylades and Orestes (nomina fama tenet), of Theseus and Pirithous, of Nisus and Euryalus. Nor, in passing to the modern era, did Summoner and Pardoner, Colin and Hobbinol, the two kings of Brentford, Sir Symphony and Sir Foeminine Fanviles, Chapman and Keats, Burke and Hare, Fortnum and Mason, Gilbert and Sullivan, Hook and Snivey, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels escape his survey, but all were mentioned, and the virtue exemplified by each particular friendship was granted its due regard.

—What, then, are the virtues advanced by family? asked Scrotes.

But MacMurrough was becoming bored with this now. Down below, the boys had touched the raft their seventh time and now they clung to the ropes. On kindlier mornings they would climb aboard, but the wind was too chill today. They rested in the water, chatting, he supposed, catching their breath, friends.

—You know, he said to Scrotes, I remember at my school the monks discouraged particular friendships. Particular friendships they condemned, if not as sin, as occasions gravid with its potential.

—Friendship tending to love may tend to desire, said Scrotes.

—Yes, but desire was there anyway. We all desired. We were riven with it. The monks policed friendship but all they effected was a sexual abandon. Instead of fumbling with love, we fumbled in the dark.

MacMurrough then descanted on desire’s having itself been the cause of friendship’s fall. For whereas desire (by which, he informed Scrotes, he intended carnal desire) was for the pantheists unproblematical (Scrotes raised his eyebrows at this), in the teleological universe of