The Fall Breakup

The Fall Breakup

First, I have no idea if I'll be returning to regular authorship (or really, abbreviated commentary) anytime soon. Outside the gilded pillars of the Ivory Tower, life's routines sweep one by and days flow into weeks and months end in the blink of an eye.

But the article at hand—Kaufman's piece is the type of writing I'd normally mass mail to my more philosophic friends, but I've decided to just post on it instead. While she writes from the perspective of the East Coast chapter of the new American elite, I find a deeper truth in her column about the nature of friendships and the inextricable dependence it has for proximity and circumstance. Friendship (and love, for that matter) seems rarely the result of similarities or same-mindedness. Far more often, we find ourselves bonding with our constant classmates, the people we live with, our team members, and sometimes, those with which we work. Just so, the crowd that the summer holiday set sees regularly on their summer escapes. We are bound together by shared encounters and experiences overwhelmingly more than by any other factor.

When the bonds of time and place slip away, many of these close unions fade and dissolve, not by intentional neglect and not for a lack of caring, but by force of our shear humanity. The capacity to maintain a million close bonds with our fellow men seems well nigh impossible, and so, as we pour ourselves into new ventures, our former lives and their attendant bonds too often fade and slip away without our knowledge, until, before we realize it, distance and time render a deep void that few (but some) friendships can traverse.

That's my two cents on the matter anyway.

UPDATE: Just a bit of random commentary and musing about the title of the NYT article... there is something about September and October that calls forth the reaper to sow his crop amidst the relationships of our lives. Not so, per se, for November....but I find a shade of truth in the broad generalizations of spring fever and death in the fall. Not to be morbid, but I do love the autumn above every other time of year, but not because of the faint air of death and the dying of the light.