Friendship

Our identity is often defined in the face of Otherness, in consideration of the Other. It is described in the negative, in what we are not or who we are not. When we try to stipulate who or what we are, we think ourselves not as but as not.
But what about frienship? How do those whom we love and hold dearly see us and in turn affects the vision and image of who we are? Are we merely the self-conjured sum of different perspectives, crafted in the mirroring-image of how we think we are being seen? Is our identity dependent on Others?
Kundera writes:

Frienship is indispensable to man for the proper function of his memory. Remembering our past, carrying it with us always, may be the necessary requirement for maintaining, as they say, the wholeness of the self. To ensure that the self doesn't shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends. they are our mirror; our memory; we ask nothing of them but that they can polish the mirror from time to time so we can look at ourselves in it.

Like Jean-Marc in Kundera's Identity, I've always valued friendship as one of the greatest gifts. Perhaps it is a romanticisation of the value it supposedly contains; in some distant past where the ideals of honour, devotion, truth, and the courage to die for another hold value. When I was younger, even not so long ago, I've always assessed the value of my frienship with another based on this outmoded chivalric ideal - would I lay down my life willingly for this friend? Frienship, they say, is forged in the heat of battle.

Perhaps the torrents of time and brutish winds of reality have awoken me to how frienship, today, is no longer based on such 'mythic' definitions. Like Jean-Marc, it is a stark awakening:

I'd like to say: between the truth and a friend, I always choose the friend ... Today I know the maxim is obsolete. It might have been valid for Achilles as Patroclus' friend, for Alexandre Dumas' musketeers, even for Sancho Panza, who was a true friend to his master despite all their disagreements. But for us it isn't any more ... Frienship was the proof of the existence of something stronger than ideology, than religion, than the nation ... How is frienship born? Certainly as an alliance against adversity, an alliance without which man would be helpless before his enemies. Maybe there's no longer a vital need for such an alliance ... The occasion no longer lends itself to searching out your wounded friend on the battlefield, or unsheathing your sabre to defend him against bandits. We go through our lives without great perils, but also without friendship.