我在二寶新店的家中看到他父母親的照片。我說，他倆1971年開學來大肚山看寶貝兒子，在餐廳用餐的神情，還記得。那時候兩老人家似乎垂暮之年了，沒想到他倆近年才過世的，伯父高壽96.....我向二寶說那你要活百歲以上呀！他笑答，生活品質比較重要。
世堂的父母，尚無緣見過。不過這些年來聽他自己說如何陪伴、服侍寡母，就可知道他是個孝子。如果你有幸聽些故事，那是運氣。
時瑋、沈哥的父親，我見過。真的是很不一樣的父輩世界。時瑋家的兄弟妹和其家屬，還出版過【愛在天井邊：爸爸媽媽真偉大】。沈哥的父親有點江湖義氣，生產過醬油，從事過營建事業。
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我們今天聚會時談過東海建築系的教育，譬如說，基本設計的老師沒解釋各題的Why.... 沒設計過靈骨塔.....(我說後者有Ando作品、黃聲遠團隊作品等等)
我怎麼談這，因為隨著時間飛逝，我們先為長輩安靈，而我們有些人也漸入老境。
http://blog.deming.org/2015/11/if-japan-can-why-cant-we-1980-nbc-special-report/
AQAIDA功Mali 的Hotel。
11點與阿標會去找二寶。
See the painting hidden in the gilt edges of the pages of the book!! It's called fore-edge painting, and this book is one of several in Cornell University Library - Rare and Manuscript Collections.
二寶的電腦有1971-72春721寢室的合照--維泰、世堂、江克慧？、阿炳、時瑋、阿珍、安祺。那些髮型和臉情，肯定是青春。二寶、沈哥、我是722室，有一次我們一大早就放古典音樂，阿炳後來還來致謝。聽二寶說世龍上大學自學小喇叭、小提琴、口琴等等，練小喇叭時被請到相思林去.....
二寶一定要將他們美國教堂置產的奇蹟故事講給沈哥聽，因為他們同是神的子民比較可以分享。他們談四人古堡歷險記 (可文玉不知道古堡在那；她說整天跟同是建築師的先生在一起；要常出來見世面、多認識朋友，明後年再辦畫展)、四人微積分低空閃過。世堂說他們在建中就修了微分，竟然被助教懷疑抄襲。很不爽。
江太太說老江物理實驗三修；老江說當時拿開課本就在想下課的活動企劃。他提同學會共同旅行想法，大家意見分歧......沈哥、阿炳、世堂搭4點的交通車上大坪林轉捷運，世堂給我們看某購物平台上他設計的產品，貼有"售罄"標章；沈哥說下回在中國幫他找容器。
The Art of Friendship
November 20, 2012 | by Jessica Vivian Chiu
Philia, the root of Philadelphia, roughly translates to “friendship” in Aristotle’sNicomachean Ethics, an enduring source for understanding the ethics of friendship. Aristotle identifies three essential bases for friendship: utility, pleasure, and virtue. Friendships of virtue, Aristotle believes, are ideal because only they are based on recognition.
When I was thirty, I moved back to Philadelphia. I had only been gone a few years, and though I knew better, I had half expected it to be just as I’d left it. It was not: most of my friends had left the city altogether or moved, married, to the edges of town. Occasionally, I would run into people I had once known, encounters that produced deep and surprising embarrassment in me; unexplained life choices digested in fast, always alienating, appraisal. The more unsettling thing was that my close friendships were changing, too.
Friendship has never seemed both more important and less relevant than it does now. The concept surfaces primarily when we worry over whether our networked lives impair the quality of our connections, our community. On a nontheoretical level, adult friendship is its own puzzle. The friendships we have as adults are the intentional kind, if only because time is short. During this period, I began to consider the subject. What is essential in friendship? Why do we tolerate difference and distance? What is the appropriate amount to give? And around this same time, I discovered the curious, decades-long friendship between the writers Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, and the sculptor Wharton Esherick. Their relationship seemed to me model in some ways; they were friends for over twenty years, mostly living in different cities. Each man was dedicated to pursuing his own line of work, and the insecurities and single-mindedness of ambition seemed analogous too to the ways that adulthood can separate us from our friends.
Wharton Esherick’s studio and living space is preserved as a museum, about thirty miles outside Philadelphia. It stands in a cluster of the artist’s other handmade buildings on a little wooded lot. Esherick created much of what is found inside the museum, from the smooth-grained floorboards to the furniture, chairs, and oblong tables balanced on shapely legs or held up by a geometry of them. There are carved doors and coat pegs, tiny busts of the workmen who built the house, plus that of a songbird that often visited. In what used to be the bedroom is a photograph of Sherwood Anderson. “I produce because I want to make something with my talent equal to [my friend’s] production,” Esherick once said. “Fine music makes fine pictures. Fine pictures make fine drama. Fine drama makes fine music or poetry or song. Each stimulates the other… ”
Esherick met Anderson in the propitious-sounding refuge of Fairhope, Alabama. It was spring, 1920. Friendship, some say, is the province of youth, but Esherick was thirty-two when he met Anderson, who was forty-three at the time. Each man was near the start of his artistic career. (Anderson had recently published Winesburg, Ohio). Fairhope was a respite for Anderson from a struggling marriage; for Esherick, it was an escape from financial stress. The colony was (and remains today) a single-tax community, born from socialist utopian ideals. “A resort &hellip full of middle class eccentrics… ” Anderson sniffed at first arrival. Later, even he was seduced by the idylls of the place. (He declared he’d gone “color mad”). It was a productive, happy time; the men spent mornings at work and afternoons in shared recreation, in the woods or on the water.
Legend has it that it was Anderson who spied Esherick’s talent for woodwork first. At the time, Esherick considered himself a painter, and he was planning an exhibition for the community. As an experiment, he carved a frame for his painting Moonlight. The frame is engraved with sprays of pine needles gilded in bronze paint. It surrounds a dark impressionist-looking painting of a stand of Alabama pines. Anderson is said to have advised Esherick to quit painting for woodwork on sight. The influence that Anderson had on Esherick’s move from painting is unknown, but it’s not hard to imagine that Anderson’s recognition and encouragement of Esherick’s talent came at an opportune time. Esherick had been frustrated by his inability to find his own painting style. “If I can’t paint like Esherick, I can at least sculpt like Esherick,“ the artist said.
Do all friendships have a Fairhope-like heart, wherein the potential of friendship is a place, real or imagined, that we continue to inhabit even when reality challenges sentiment? Sentiment, the thing that Lionel Trilling said cost Anderson the ability to convey meaning in writing, may have no better host than friendship. Consider Anderson’s story “Loneliness.” In it, Enoch Robinson is a man of secret ambition and yearning. He sets out to be an artist in the familiar way. He goes to New York City and discovers people who set him aflame with enthusiasm, but who also have the uneasy effect of making him stupefied and mute, sidelined. Somewhat abruptly, Enoch gets married, becomes a father, dispatches to the suburbs. For a time, he takes pride in appearances, but a gnawing dissatisfaction gets the better of him. He leaves. Alone, Enoch peoples a room with invisible men and women, in whose special company Enoch finds happiness at last. When he meets a woman who promises real companionship, he feels his imaginary friends threatened. He drives her away and she flees, “taking all his people with her.”
There is an uneasy symmetry between the lives of Sherwood Anderson and Enoch Robinson. Anderson was a prosperous businessman until he made a dramatic break from his job and family. Shortly after, he took up writing full time. Anderson even kept a room in his country house full of photos of friends and men he admired. ‘[Y]ou may think it’s a poor substitute,” he wrote to H. L. Menken, in a letter requesting that Menken send a picture to add to his wall, “but a picture framed and hung up in a room I am in and out of every day does seem to bring my friends closer… ” The letter carries a whiff of Enoch Robinson’s ruinous impulses, giving the faint impression that friendship is a self-validating enterprise, friends themselves less important. Fortunately, likeness is fleeting. Enoch, hamstrung by ego, threatened by actuality, is condemned to life as an outcast; Anderson had many friends and admirers. And though he built a career on writing about alienation as a symptom of industrial life, he was not indifferent to its pleasures. He died, in 1941, after choking on a martini toothpick while cruise-bound for South America.
One day in 1916, Anderson, a longtime admirer of Dreiser’s, dropped in on the other man, uninvited. Dreiser closed the door in Anderson’s face, then promptly went to his desk to write a letter to Anderson apologizing for the bad behavior. “My first attempt to come a little closer to Dreiser,” Anderson admitted later, “was a failure.” Esherick’s first overtures to Dreiser were similarly rebuffed. Invited by an actress named Kirah Markham, Dreiser visited a theater near where the Eshericks lived with instructions to stay with the Eshericks overnight. It was 1924. When the theater lights dimmed, Esherick tapped Dreiser on the shoulder to whisper introduction and Dreiser, surprised, awkward as ever, pointedly ignored him.
The letters between Anderson, Esherick, and Dreiser are rich in the Aristotelian pleasure. Letters sent between 1920 and 1940 note arrivals, departures, delays, and visits to and from homes in Paoli, rural Virginia, New York City, and Mount Kisco. The men sailed on the Barnegat Bay, walked together in woods, drank and socialized together. They were ribald. Esherick’s papers include letters decorated with lusty doodles, a bosomy woman showering nude, a sketch of Anderson’s enormous rear end. Utility, too, emerges in material and emotional support. Dreiser employed Esherick to work on Dreiser’s country house in Mount Kisco; Esherick collaborated with Anderson on his collection of essays No Swank. When Esherick’s wife was hospitalized, it was Dreiser who offered words of reassurance and support. Dreiser penned Anderson’s eulogy and Esherick created the gravestone, a crescent that rises out of the ground, curving round itself, that reads, “Life, not death, is the great adventure.”
I had hoped the letters might reveal something about friendship: how to be a good friend, when to let go. And they did—but in negative. Virtue, it seems, lives in action; the ways that we make recognition known in matters important and not. Dreiser to Esherick: “Your future today is absolutely all ahead of you.” Anderson to Dreiser: “Jennie, Sister Carrie, the boy in Tragedy … In any one of such stories you break so much ground… ” Esherick’s scene-by-scene report to Anderson about the performance of a staging of Anderson’s Winesburg near Esherick’s home. The men gossiped, joked, and advised each other on reading, professional opportunities, family matters.
Friendship, Aristotle suggests, is the most immediate form of public personhood; it motivates a person for moral excellence, ennobles us to become a stronger unit for a social whole. And yet, the thing is this: the very material of friendship is the exchange of it. In friendship, sentiment is the relationship. Friendship may have a public aspect, but it is essentially a private exchange. If the letters between Anderson, Esherick, and Dreiser showed me anything, it is that friendship remains the special provenance of those who live it.
My own friendships go on changing, adjusting by degrees to demands that I won’t totally understand. A becomes a parent. B wrestles over what a career should look like. C’s stubborn nostalgia threatens to uproot what we still have in common. The reassuring thing is that no single law rules over us. Friendship is a return, as variable as we are.
Jessica Vivian Chiu lives in Philadelphia, PA.
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