ON MAKING FRIENDS.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19785, 10 May 1926, Page 13

ON MAKING FRIENDS.

Considering that most friendships are made by mere hazard, how it is that men find themselves equipped and fortified with jiist the friends they need? We have heard of men who asserted that they would like to have more money, or more books, or more pairs of pyjamas ; but we have never heard of a man saying that he did not have enough friends. For, while one can never have too many friends, yet those one has are always enough. They satisfy us completely. One has never met a man who would say, ‘T wish I had a friend who would combine the good humour of A, the mystical enthusiasm of B, the love of doughnuts, which is such an enduring quality in C, and who would also have the habit of giving Sunday evening suppers like D, and the wellstocked cellar which is so deplorably lacking in E! No; the curious thing is lhat at any lime and in any settled way of life a man is generally provided with friends far in excess of his desert, and also in excess of his capacity to absorb their wisdom and affectionate attentions. There is some pleasant secret behind this —a secret that none is wise enough to fathom. The -infinite fund of disinterested humane kindliness that is adrift in the world is part of the riddle, the insoluble riddle of life that is born in our blood and tissue. It is agreeable to think that no man, save by his own gross fault, ever went through life unfriended, without companions to whom he could stammer in momentary impulses of sagacity, to whom he could turn m hours of loneliness. It is not even necessary to know a man to be his friend One can sit ot a lunch counter, observing the moods and whims of the white-coated pie-passer, and by the time you have juggled a couple of fried eggs you will have caught some grasp of his philosophy of life, seen the quick edge and tang of his humour, memorised the shrewdness of his worldly insight, and been as truly stimulated as if you had spent an evening with your favourite parson.—Safety Pins and Other Essays, Christopher Morley (Jonathan C(ipe).