Wretchard says: And I would do wrong to laugh at those yearn fruitlessly for love; who circle the globe looking for their Sailor From Gibraltar, or go through clip joints looking for Velma.

Interesting that Wretchard references a passage from The Brothers Karamazov that is basically about friendship and familial affection rather than romantic love. I sometimes wonder how many people feel needlessly lonely in the contemporary world because they have been told implicitly (by advertising as well as popular novels and magazines) that erotic love is the only kind that “really” counts and that to lack a romantic or sexual partner is to somehow fail as a human being. Our ancestors were wiser in this matter, acknowledging that friendship can be as powerful a bond and as worthy a school for character as sexual mating. I find myself thinking of Book IV, chapter 9, in Augustine’s Confessions, in which the bishop looks back on his youth, including his passionate grief for a close friend who died too soon. After recounting the intensity of his mourning for his friend, Augustine concludes that no love is ever truly lost if one is but mindful of its ultimate source: “Blessed is he who loves thee, and who loves his friend in thee, and his enemy also, for thy sake; for he alone loses none dear to him, if all are dear in Him who cannot be lost. And who is this but our God: the God that created heaven and earth, and filled them because he created them by filling them up?”

I like to think that BC is in its own quiet way shaping a community of friends.