Frank Bruni
By Frank Bruni
Mar 14, 2024
Where did J. go? For a while there he was such a treasured part of my life, someone I thought about frequently, someone I yearned to see, someone whose dinner company I relished, someone whose emails made me smile. I can't remember how we met -- a mutual acquaintance, I think -- but after we did, I never traveled to his city without contacting him in advance and making plans to see him. And he regularly checked in on me.
Until he stopped. Was that five years ago? More? And did he stop or did I? I'm not sure. I just know that I was busy, he was busy, my travel decreased and one day I suddenly realized that we'd lost touch with each other. I also felt strangely timid about reaching out: If he wanted to hear from me, wouldn't I have heard more recently from him? Or was he thinking the exact same thing?
I wondered and wondered. Then some pressing obligation or competing anxiety tugged my attention elsewhere. Then more time went by. And here J. and I are -- or, rather, aren't. We're onetime confidants who never had a falling out, never said a proper goodbye, simply evaporated from each other's lives like dew from a blade of grass.
I'm haunted by how many times, and with how many friends, that has happened. By how the bustle of our lives and the bustle in our heads take people away from us, though we never intended to let them go. By how unintentional, unavoidable and subtly but stubbornly sad that is.
There are friends in our pasts who are there for obvious reasons. We disappointed or hurt them. They disappointed or hurt us. The relationship wasn't healthy or ceased to be happy, and while that was unfortunate and perhaps painful, it was also clear. It demanded a change. Those friends don't exit our thoughts, but they also don't hover there like question marks. We understand what happened, even if we mourn it.
But there are at least as many friends in our pasts for no specific reason, and the older I grow, the more that nags at me.
Few people give me the pleasure that P. did: She and I had the same mischievous sense of humor, the same appreciation for an intense hour or two of exercise followed immediately by an indulgent meal, the same taste in books, the same zest for discussing them. How did our friendship not survive my move away from the city in which it flourished? And why did neither of us ever circle back to examine and remedy that?
And what about M.? He was so smart, so open, so warm. Our friendship took quickly. I thought it would have staying power. But he was gone even before I left the city where we met and talked and drank and laughed. He joined high school classmates, college companions and early-career compatriots in a mental scrapbook that's a gallery of ghosts -- faint presences who will never fully materialize, the vaporous traces of them reminders of broken promises, though I can't say with any certainty who did the breaking. Probably them and me both.
I'm lucky. I've lived in enough different places, had enough different professional opportunities and met a wide enough variety of people to have struck up many friendships. But that tremendously good fortune has also led me to a cold and bitter truth: There are too few hours in a day and days in a year to tend adequately to, or even keep proper tabs on, all the people who have meant something to us and all the people we have meant something to. Affection and attachment battle basic arithmetic, and arithmetic wins.
Some tweak in your job or living arrangement diminishes your overlap of interests with someone as it also lessens or eliminates your routine interactions with that person, and the extra effort necessary to sustain your relationship turns out to be something that one or both of you can't quite manage. You drift ever farther apart, until the distance between you is too great to navigate.
That's no doubt what happened with J. I wrote that there wasn't any specific reason for our friendship's end, but that's wrong. There just wasn't any interesting or compelling one. Pride, insecurity, callousness: None of those doomed us. Logistics did. We simply stopped fitting with ease into each other's lives. And that -- as surely as any ugly conflict or any cruel betrayal -- can make someone disappear.
On the WBUR website, Anita Diamant eulogized the inimitable clotheshorse and trendsetter Iris Apfel, who recently died at the age of 102, by recalling a visit to an exhibit of the outfits Apfel wore: "Every mannequin was loaded with layers upon layers (upon layers) of garments and embellishments and gewgaws that challenged propriety, common sense, and in some cases, gravity. Elaborate fabrics in shocking combinations were accessorized with feathers, bells, mirrors and so much jewelry: bangles stacked from wrist to elbow, strands of enormous beads that formed a kind of breastplate. Pins the size of small birds. A flock of small birds. And as nutty as the juxtapositions seemed, they created a kind of harmony. A triumph of muchness." (Thanks to Sarah Smith of New Orleans for nominating this.)
In The Washington Post, Matt Bai reflected on the entire surreal arc of Donald Trump's political, er, progress since 2015: "Trump didn't begin his presidential campaign in 2015 with some Wile E. Coyote-type plan to upend the party and take over the country. Like everything else Trump had done in his life to that point, that campaign began as little more than a Barnumesque exercise in self-promotion, a chance to further the family brand." Bai added: "It must have surprised Trump to find that the Republican Party could be acquired and replaced as easily as a failing hotel chain." (Jeanette Clark, San Antonio)
The entire surreal arc of Senator Kyrsten Sinema was examined by another Washington Post essayist, Monica Hesse: "Washington is very accustomed to empty suits. It's less accustomed to empty batwing dresses." (Betsy Snider, Acworth, N.H., and Peter Walsworth, Providence, R.I.)
In The Atlantic, Jennifer Senior heaved a sigh of relief about President Biden's energetic delivery of his State of the Union address, which challenged her previous conviction that Trump was bound for victory on Nov. 5 and her terror: "I imagined myself on a flight bound for Reykjavik, Lisbon, Sydney, wherever on Nov. 6, staring backward out the window and squinting at the smoking ruins of American democracy, grimly praying that I wouldn't turn into a pillar of salt." (Holly Freifeld, Portland, Ore.)
In The Dispatch, Nick Catoggio studied the visage of a key member of the audience for the State of the Union address: "Visible in-frame over Biden's left shoulder, House Speaker Mike Johnson struggled all evening to find facial expressions that conveyed disagreement without seeming off-puttingly disrespectful. The extended, more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger choreography of exaggerated grimaces and head-shakes he settled on was familiar to me instantly as a longtime fan of the New York Jets." (Michael Smith, Georgetown, Ky.)
In The Times, John McWhorter rolled his eyes at traditional rules about where prepositions can and cannot be placed: "Late last month, Merriam-Webster shared the news on Instagram that it's OK to end a sentence with a preposition. Hats off to them, sincerely. But it is hard to convey how bizarre, to an almost comical degree, such a decree seems in terms of how language actually works . It is rather like announcing that it is now permissible for cats to meow." (Amy Glass, Washington, Ill.)
Also in The Times, Oussama Zahr reviewed a recital by Igor Levit, one of the world's most celebrated pianists: "He was playing the Nocturne from Hindemith's 'Suite 1922,' a collection of five genre pieces like marches and rags, and there are a few moments in which the pianist only needs to use one hand. Gesturing with his left one in a downward pressing motion, he seemed to tell himself, 'Gentle, gentle,' as he plucked starlight off the page and dispersed it through the air." (Dennis Blubaugh, Perrysburg, Ohio, and Lorraine Smith-Phelan, Manhattan)
Susan Dominus, talking with Kate Winslet, explained Ozempic and its ilk. "I went on: It was a shot people took that dampened their interest in food," Susan wrote. "Winslet looked appalled -- as if I'd just told her that millions of Americans were voluntarily injecting themselves with something that made them feel dead inside when they looked at a sunset." (Melissa Peterson, Moorhead, Minn.)
And Bret Stephens described Trump's effect on his politics: "I used to be a middle-of-the-road Republican. Nowadays, I think of myself as a Scoop Jackson Democrat -- and my views have barely shifted. If my taxes go up, I'll live. If my democracy goes down, I won't." (Conrad Macina, Landing, N.J.)
To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in "For the Love of Sentences," please email me here and include your name and place of residence.
It is with existential angst that I bring up the word "existential," which is so sloppily and promiscuously overused, as at the start of this sentence.
"Existential" once connoted great stakes -- and even then was traveling far from its original meaning. It now connotes a writer reaching too readily for a sense of profundity and urgency. And that's one of the most frequent and recurring complaints that newsletter readers have raised in emails to me since I started this occasional newsletter feature, previously titled "Words Worth Sidelining," more than a year and a half ago.
"I'm tired of hearing that everything is an existential threat," Peter G. Miller of Pensacola, Fla., wrote to me in September 2022. "Such a highfalutin word. Sure, if you're at a convention of Oxford dons, then use the term as much as you like. But, otherwise, it's an existential irritation."
When I emailed Miller recently to make certain that it was OK to quote him, he volunteered "some existential updates" in the form of headlines from the past few years from Ms. magazine ("Barbie's Existential Crisis and the Fight for Reproductive Justice"), Electric Lit ("When Turning 30 Becomes an Existential Crisis"), SB Nation ("The Existential Guilt Crushing the Seattle Mariners") and The Times ("The Existential Crossroads of Bathing Suit Shopping").
What's especially strange about this "existential" epidemic is that the primary definition of "existential," per Merriam-Webster , isn't "epic" or "identity-rattling" or "civilization-defining" or all that's suggested by those just-cited deployments of the adjective. It's "of, relating to, or affirming existence." And when you forage for proper definitions of "existentialism" -- as in the school of philosophical thought or inquiry typically associated with Jean-Paul Sartre -- you similarly wind up with nothing about peak direness, maximal urgency, galactic stakes. The descriptions you encounter are akin to this explanation from The Ethics Centre : "Existentialism is the philosophical belief we are each responsible for creating purpose or meaning in our own lives."
The most common appearances of "existential" in the media diverge significantly from that, as a lament by Charles Lane in The Washington Post in May detailed . "Exceedingly rare in American English before the 21st century, 'existential threat' has achieved full-blown cliche status since then, its usage surpassing the equally serviceable but less highfalutin 'potential disaster,' according to Google's Ngram viewer tool, which measures how frequently words and phrases cropped up in books since 1800."
We've reached "existential" exhaustion, so let's give the word a breather, though the temptation to trot it out will be great if polls keep auguring a second Trump term. That can be described with terms other than "existential threat." I nominate "democratic suicide."
"Retire These Words!" is an occasionally recurring feature. To suggest a term or phrase, please email me here , and please include your name and place of residence.
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/14/opinion/friend-breakup-friendship.html
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