I’m not sure where I dug up the reference to Tim Kreider’s We Learn Nothing, but I am sure it was from a self-help book.

So, when I began with this book, I was quite confused. It was like taking a sip of coffee, expecting the bitterness of a black coffee but testing the sweet, creamy flavor from the choice of your friend opposite you with your cup and a disgusted frown on his forehead after tasting yours.

So, this is not a self-help book. They are essays about the strangeness in Tim Kreider’s life. Just to mention a few:

He is stabbed in the throat and escapes death.

A year-long friend passes away and is found to have lived in a slum and has suffered from severe mental problems. Tim and his friends continue to love him, not even forgivingly, but rather naturally.

A friend has a sex operation and changes into a woman, but very much remains Tim’s old-school friend.

We learn Tim is adopted and how he later in life finds his biological mother and two sisters.

The book’s theme is friendship and love, and the confusing interrelationship and differences between them.

It came as a belated epiphany to me when I learned that the Greeks had several different words for the disparate phenomena that in English we indiscriminately lump together under the label love. Our inability to distinguish between, say, eros (sexual love) and storgé (the love that grows out of friendship) leads to more than semantic confusion. Careening through this world with such a crude taxonomical guide to human passion is as foolhardy as piloting a plane ignorant of the difference between stratus and cumulonimbus, knowing only the word cloud.

 

Also, about the laziness and passive character of de-friending, real-life defriending, not Facebook defriending. I found it very recognizable, and I am sure most of my defriending was due to this laziness. I am equally sure most of these friendships would have continued if the other person had reached out.

Defriending isn’t just unrecognized by some social oversight; it’s protected by its own protocol, a code of silence. Demanding an explanation wouldn’t just be undignified; it would violate the whole tacit contract on which friendship is founded. The same thing that makes friendship so valuable is what makes it so tenuous: it is purely voluntary. You enter into it freely, without the imperatives of biology or the agenda of desire.

An achievement to write about such topics and dramatic events in an undramatic but sensitive style. Humorous and nicely illustrated (though very difficult to read on Kindle).