観念 / kan-nen / idea, notion, conception

Dear Liz :-)

Woolf in true impressionistic form uses a variance of adjectives to describe the soul in this particular meditation on the mysteries of human attraction; she layers them on, impasto-like - “secret chambers”, “tombs of kings”, “waters poured into one jar”, “dome-shaped hives” - all of which (chambers, tombs, jars, domes, hives) have the primary characteristic of being enclosed and sealed-off from outside effluvia. All are containers, all contain but do not readily disclose their contents to a casual observer, i.e. to most the individual human soul is protected from what is perhaps inimical to its integrity, barricaded and not easily accessible. And the main character whose thought is that of people as tombs and interiors closed off to her completely in their individual fastness wonders: how does one then achieve intimacy? how is one drawn to another human being, how does one, by loving another, attain unity between two entities which by nature are barred from mingling? How does one “know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they are” against external knowledge? Does the milk of true friendship and human connection ever have the industrial strength necessary to completely or even partially dissolve the walls guarding the fort of the human soul?

I think the answer (Woolf doesn’t offer one, she provokes but doesn’t preach) lies in the acceptance of the futility of ever successfully knowing another, for the human heart has many “treasures, like the treasures in the tombs of kings, bearing sacred inscriptions, which if one could spell them out would teach one everything, but they would never be offered openly, never made public” - to make a friend is to acknowledge both the range of what that friend chooses to offer up to you in gift-giving of herself, but also to feel calm in the inherent limitations of that range. And while some people may be extraordinary and bountiful gift-givers, others may present you with only one or two sacred objects, and frustrate you because you have been teased with some “sweetness or sharpness in the air intangible to touch and taste”, with the realisation that you, and everyone, is essentially fated to “range the wastes of the air over the countries of the world alone”. Human connection is elusive, transitory and not always powerful. Bees have a very short lifespan, and they spend the entirety of it in a flux of seeking and satiation, constant;y buzzing after the next source of honey, never resting, always ranging, following the air-trails of pollen towards the next rustling hive. (Except for the queen bee I suppose who just sits, fat and torpid, pushing out eggs, but that’s besides the point, and defeats the metaphor, so suspend your disbelief) Yet such is human nature - people sense a sweetness, an intelligence, that indefinable something-or-other hanging about another like a cloud of pollen, and their atavistic bee instincts send them raring towards the possibility of a honey-well.

Despite all that I said about the futility of the endeavour of friendship and about how each bee-human, at the end of time, will be in a swarm of one, surrounded by murmurings and stirrings of the hives that are people, but apart from them, haunting the fundamentally inaccessible, I don’t think anybody should, and indeed, can, ever give up on Friendship: The Great Venture. And I think my wish for you (and this is a very detailed and well thought out wish that is probably too specific for the general platitudinous birthday card i.e. “happy birthday liz i love you grow fat and happy thanks for the memories xxx” HAHA) is that you continue to be as extraordinary as you are now at making and keeping close friends, continue to possess that spectacular and quite rare mixture that you have of perception in piercing the tissue of the barriers to the human soul and laying bare the gifts of friendship within and stamina in maintaining that level of intimacy, once achieved. But I also send up an attached caveat-wish for you: I hope that as you grow old and time passes, along with the flaring up and cooling of many little blazes of friendship, you come to have more acceptance of how every human-hive is essentially barricaded in bricks of honey against the wind and rain which would damage the secret cells within, and come to perhaps attach less importance to the extent to which intimacy is granted you.

You are so good at being a friend. So loyal, so funny, so intelligent, so trustworthy and trusting, so equal parts hilarious and wise. I think sometimes the extent to which you are so very proficient at making friends creates a slight pitfall in which you worry about those friendships that aren’t as entirely open as the many others you have that are. So my birthday wish for your 19th year on earth is for you to forge new intimacies, keep old ones, and let the natural rhythm of things fall into place. You are one of the best people I know at a great many things. There isn’t any need to say your future glows the clearest and brightest probably out of all our group of friends because you know how much I hold your talent and acumen in high esteem, and you know yourself how strong you are and how determined.

Lizzi-bee, I wish you all the happiness and all the truths in life, and thank you for giving me so much of your friendship these past years and receiving mine with such grace and warmth.