At lunchtime I bought a huge orange, wrote Wendy Cope. Her concise yet profound poem on the simple wonder of companionship goes on to detail a pleasant, unremarkable day where she finds happiness in continued existence. It seems to the reader, however, that the companionship she has during this unremarkable day is in fact what elevates it. Even the quietest among us crave, to some degree, the presence of others, and there seems to be a particular connection between the act of eating and the people who are around us when we do it. I often wonder why. It’s difficult to talk while you eat, and no one looks their best while chewing. This predilection is about intimacy. I want to sit beside you when both our mouths are full. I want to sit and watch a film with you. I want to be silent, but it’s you I want to share this silence with. (Or, as Cope would put it: I love you. I’m glad I exist.)
Far be it from me to reduce our longing for tenderness to a whim driven by the pandemic. However, I will concede that the best pieces of these three years were found in the company of others. September’s dawn brought weeks of sitting around at school, cheerful among friends, eating without worrying how I looked while I was doing it. I love you, wrote Christopher Citro. I want us both to eat well. Remote again, I pick at a bowl filled with half-cold food and stare across an empty table. My parents take their lunches in front of their computers, and my sisters must be coerced into theirs. Despite my efforts, there is no one to commiserate with.
What do we owe to each other? Scanlon posed the question years ago as a framework for morality. I posit that we owe each other kindness. When provided the opportunity, we have nothing to lose by goodness. It is easy to talk about how we should do the right thing, and go on crusades about equality and justice, but it is harder to listen to a friend talk about their troubles for once, to give up our seat on the subway when we are tired. How much political theory can be reframed by looking at the basic effect we have on other people? The kindness we can extend to strangers, our family, our friends—this will make a material difference in the world.
Which is not to say that political discourse isn’t important, because it is. I just mean to say that I find an amusing cognitive dissonance in the self-proclaimed Marxist who goes on about the solidarity of the working class only to come home and shout at his wife. You cannot be trusted to run the world if you cannot be trusted to be decent to those closest to you. Humans are not meant to be alone, so we have an irritating tendency to accept less than what we should simply because the other person happens to be there and willing. There is a difference between accepting someone for their foibles and accepting someone who hurts you. The first will make you glad you exist. The second will make you wish you were someone else. Our searches against loneliness may not always be successful, but they are nonetheless essential.
We eat with each other, then, to sustain ourselves. There is a straightforward aspect to this conclusion: the act of eating itself, but it isn’t the crux of the matter. When we are in the company of others, unembarrassed and fulfilled by their presence, we sustain ourselves in a far more meaningful way. It is the subject of every poem; this wanting for someone to be with, mourning their absence, pleasure in their presence. The theory of friendship is simple, pulled from storybooks, but in practice it is very hard. I task you with this: abandon loneliness. When you can, don’t eat alone.
I may fall victim to the limits of my ideology. I have had days where I shut myself off, preferring to stew on my private sadness. There are times when you’re exhausted enough not to yield your seat, when you take the last piece of fruit, when you need to talk about yourself—and this is not evidence of a personal failure, but rather a kindness you accept from others. No one can go at life alone, and as a result no one can be good alone. Your kindness cannot help if it is not accepted, and the same is true of what is done to you. There is no limitation if you do not choose to accept it.
Kindness is found in Wendy Cope’s orange. They got quarters and I had a half. Did she want to eat the orange alone? Does it matter? I can see the group in my mind’s eye, sitting on a blanket in a park and laughing together. I think there is an instinct to trivialize joy as less meaningful, less complex, and less interesting than desolation. We ridicule poems about contentment as trite, aim for what elucidates our struggles. There is value in seeing your suffering recognized, but there is just as much (if not more) meaning in the reflection of joy. It is reductive of the human experience to suggest that only miserable poems can depict it. Where there is opportunity for immense suffering, it follows that we can find incandescent joy.
Joy can be a huge orange, as long as it is not eaten alone.
Every time you reference a particular author, I just sit there smiling and looking fondly at my phone because in doing that, you are offering kindness to their craft. It feels as though you are bringing that world they created to spin peacefully next to the one that you are building which as a result makes your writing so human and so wonderfully unique. I appreciate you highlighting the complexity of friendship and joy that tend to fall behind other themes such as romance or sadness when all of these concepts should be regarded with care and thoughtfulness. Thank you for writing this, it's so so so powerful and melodic, you are the master of poetic prose.