Previously mundane comments around work and kids now revealed the edges of one’s relative privilege, or lack thereof—starting with who had space to work from home, who could work at home (or at a second home, or at the home of a grandparent who could help with child care), who still had work at all (and what kind of work?). The possibility of friendship—of equality—hinged more on class and race and gender than ever. The field of friendly conversation shifted accordingly.The pandemic reoriented our economy of attention, especially online, re-clarifying the limits of who and what we could care about. Some got off social media, while others posted more than ever. As someone who stayed on, so much of what others said—from complaints to commiseration to humblebrags—felt unusually sticky with significance. No speech act online felt fortuitous, or safe from projection or scrutiny. Every articulation of suffering or joy cut disproportionately into others. Our resources dwindling, I had never felt so much, at times, like the world had tricked us into believing that we were playing zero-sum games. One person’s passing anecdote online became fodder for someone else’s private group text. Which is, I’ll admit, one way my new pandemic friend and I bonded over this past year
In his essay “Friendship,” from 1841, Ralph Waldo Emerson begins with a parable: a “commended stranger” arrives at another’s house, representing “only the good and new.” Brimming with expectant generosity, the two hit it off: “We talk better than we are wont. We have the nimblest fancy, a richer memory, and our dumb devil as taken leave for the time.” But, after some dinner and some more talk, “the stranger begins to intrude his partialities, his definitions, his defects, into the conversation,” and then, suddenly, “it is all over.” The only friend worth having, Emerson tells us, is one who remains somewhat unknown.
What a perpetual disappointment is actual society… . Our faculties do not play us true, and both parties are relieved by solitude.” Emerson was writing amid a crisis of liberal democracy, when the fervor of abolitionism was starting to show its cracks and the politics of protest were being co-opted into mere symbolism and more self-interested agendas. He may have prized a degree of detachment, in part, because he was skeptical of groupthink
