Graduate school was a kind of arcadia, a “green world,” where faculty and flock would sometimes meet on hot summer afternoons outside of town at someone’s place by a lake, swim, and hang around until early morning. It was better than extended family because grad students easily get into discursive excursions, having little sense of border between seminar and party. I had the most idyllic friendships. The stage of life was a large part of it, too.

Our department in those days (mid-‘70s) was a great experiment (like Antioch or Black Mountain) engineered by mostly-young faculty unwittingly released to their own designs by a university wanting a graduate program in philosophy that would be unique (but the administration later regretted the counter-cultural uniqueness they got). It felt like a Bloomsbury—an ideal.

It’s curious I recall that 30+ years later. I think it’s symbolic of autobiographical desire that grows with age: metonymically gaining a sense of distance itself in terms of a point—not really a milestone; but one is twenty-something only once—in our case facing history as if we can redirect it in few years. Such urgent times.

A certain naïveté is good for discovering what was presumed undiscoverable. Incipiencies can be born that remain generative for life, simply because so much energy is available for audacity. Though conceptions can take decades to gain good form, one requires the conceptions.

I recall that also because the sense of relationship was so rich. Sensibility can intimate a kaleidoscope (broadly, trOpically speaking) of relationships. For a philosophy student especially, the concept of relationship can be at stake in the scale of engagement.

As one feels for friendship, so may go one’s intimacy with a textual story. Giving oneself to a story may teach difficult things about openness in friendship—a theme I want to explore further, you know. (I recently happened across an old essay—news to me—by the well-known philosopher of art, Ted Cohen, titled “Metaphor and the Cultivation of Intimacy” [1978]. I haven’t read it yet. He’s quite old now, but recently published a book that transposes his aesthetic thinking into an ethics!: Thinking of Others: on the talent for metaphor [Princeton, 2008]).

In growth, we test and learn all manner—every degree—of relations, and it all belongs with friends. In our friendships, we share what we are, what we have. We bring the near-and-dear into ourselves as much as possible through vitalities of engagement, warmth and empathy, and so many ephemeral pleasures. There can be a depth of presence, engaged and engaging minds, simple fun, insatiable curiosity, and sharing that seems to one or the other profound—or at least happily worth inhabiting.

So, the infelicitous notion of relationship can be luminous (and numinous), echoing (to my mind) in those mundane, embodied concerns people have about “our relationship.” The relationship: It’s a simple point, but so are dark forests. We’re brought to reflect, potentially making explicit what’s implicitly prevailing, and that’s often too much attention to complex reality that’s comfortably presumed to be much simpler. In great part, we live our days in fictions.

For me, though, where a conversation may go, where a text may go, is a kind of welcome seafaring, risky and enchanting, intriguing and scary. I love the risk of finding out what’s on The Other Side (or finding a way out of feeling insatiability).

Putting it in a typically verbose way: Intimacies of time intimated in resonant relations allow flows between outer-directed, interpersonal life and inner-directed, interpsychic life that may grow to burst with elating possibilities of imagination and conception—an eros of eurekas or inspirations whose wake can last for years.

[Hyperbole is a risk of improvisation. I’m feeling an appeal of shared creativity in a sense of intersubjectivity that’s beyond interpersonal life.]