Good legislators care more for friendship than justice
Perhaps the worst thing about the current crisis is the loss of friendship.
Letters from Vienna #2
Perhaps the worst thing about the current crisis is the loss of friendship. Montaigne wrote:
“It seems that nature has trained us for nothing other than society. And Aristotle says: good legislators care more for friendship than justice.”
“In friendship, there is a general and universal warmth, tempered and even, a constant and reassuring heat, all sweetness and smooth, which is in no way harsh or poignant.”
Furthermore: “Besides, what we ordinarily call friends and friendships are merely acquaintances and familiarities established by some occasion or convenience, by means of which our souls converse. In the friendship of which I speak, they mingle and merge one into the other, with a mixture so universal that they erase and no longer find the seam that joined them. If I am urged to say why I loved him, I feel that this can only be expressed by answering: “Because it was he, because it was I.””
Without wishing to address the question of degree of friendship I must regretfully note that I’ve lost many a friend due to the unhappy phenomenon of shedding, political, medical or scientific disagreement or the misfortune of being murdered in a hospital. Nothing has impoverished me more or thrown me back on a loneliness I once felt so keenly.
Of course, for a variety of reasons, which I prefer not to discuss, I’m not as lonely as I once was yet I still do indeed suffer from an appalling loss of fellowship, so much so that I’m pleased by the act of shopping in a way I never was before. I was hardly aware that the act of going to a small grocery store could be such a feast of humanity. For the first time in my life I have come to celebrate the buying and selling of goods; in the past I regarded such matters as banal, boring or, at best, disagreeable chores.
This is why I am hardly surprised that I see so few people working away at the self-service, automated check-outs in supermarkets. Of course, the fact that people have no incentive to do so is partly the answer but it is undoubtedly the social dimension they miss. And this is the reason I hear so often the complaint that the harder the employees are forced to work, the more disagreeable the atmosphere and the lesser the willingness to shop.
One friend I miss currently has an exhibition in Vienna yet I dare not go there. I am, more exactly, under the present, irrational rules, not permitted to do so, which is a shame, since I find his art highly enjoyable. Furthermore, he was at the point of achieving ever greater critical and commercial success at the cusp of the fateful measures of 2020. For him the loss of income due to the lockdowns is an utter disaster.
We once played chess (of course, he invariably won) in various backwater cafés (where I am no longer permitted to go) with names such as: Weidinger, Ritter or Café im Raimundhof and I spent hours in his bright, draughty studio in a former workshop, walking around, studying the beautiful work on the tables and walls, drinking wine or eating delicious Turkish food, listening to him talk of art, history or politics or tell of his life in Japan and his ongoing love of Japanese culture and its people.
Another friend, a Brazilian, shared my love of music and, above all else: Musikverein. He, too, is not doing well but for completely different reasons. His marriage fell apart just before the first lockdown and it was next to impossible to find a room where he could stay together with his dogs. His business collapsed as a consequence of his marital discord and he was financially ruined. He was exiled to the back of the beyond and it was impossible to visit him.
Yet perhaps the third, most tragic, case is the one of an old lady to whom I became uncommonly attached, a neighbour I got to know after I’d heard her cries for help. She wanted to repay my services with unusual generosity to which I replied: the best way of doing so was by talking of the past. So, every time I visited she spoke of her experiences after the war. Life was far from easy, money too tight to mention, everything dependent on credit and trust, and little to be had.
She spoke of how her son worked so hard for a computer firm that he neglected his health and died young of cancer. It was a common tale. Another old lady I once knew told of how she’d been tricked into signing over the house she’d bought to her niece only for her son to die under mysterious circumstances. He’d fallen while walking down steps into the basement. Had his wife pushed him or had he fallen? The police couldn’t tell. Whatever the case may be: she lost both son and house. Every day she travelled to his grave many miles away until she herself joined him there.
Without a son or daughter to look after her and unable to live without continual help, I lost count of the times the old lady I first wrote of fell and I had to rescue her, she was forced to move to an old people’s home. At the beginning she was enthusiastic and could speak of little else. But then came the restrictions on visitors and her complaint that “they” (she never specified who) were trying to kill her.
She tried to flee but, betrayed by her landlord, who, without her consent or legal permission, had cleared her flat and rented it anew, she had no choice but to return to her inevitable doom. When I heard of her passing, of course: “due to Covid”, I was hardly surprised. The culling of the elderly in hospitals and old people’s homes has long been a common feature of contemporary life. It is part of a reality most prefer not to discuss.