The Things of Friends Are Common

by Christopher B. Nelson

Welcome to the Class of 2013 [this is a Convocation Address delivered in 2009 at St. John’s College, Ed.] and to your families. To the rest of our college community, welcome back. Welcome, friends all! I came to a rather startling realization over the summer as I was preparing to greet our newcomers: that I had returned to this college to take the position I now hold in the year in which most of our incoming freshmen were born. The years have passed quickly, it seems to me now, and my appreciation for the community of learning I joined back then has grown, as my friendships within the community have deepened. I think I became a wee bit sentimental as I ruminated upon my first year as a student at St. John’s more than 40 years ago. My Greek has gone rusty, but as with most all of memory, the things learned first are remembered best, and I have kept with me over the years two Greek sentences I recall reading in my first days at the college. Xαλεπά τα kαλά and Κοίνά τά τών φίλων.

The first can be roughly translated as “Beautiful things are difficult” or “Noble things are difficult.” The second can be translated as “The things of friends are common” or “What friends have, they have in common.” Back in the days of my youth we used a different Greek grammar book, so this last week I took a peek at the Mollin and Williamson Introduction to Ancient Greek that you will be working with in your first semester of the Greek Tutorial. And there they were, the same two sentences, buried in an early lesson on the attributive and predicate position of the definite article, and I rediscovered something I once must have known about the two sentences I had carried with me all these years: that they are both nominal sentences with the article τά in the predicate position, making it possible to write intelligible, whole sentences without the use of a verb. (Grammar is a handy tool, don’t you think?) Well, I was pretty sure that I had not committed these sentences to memory for the substantive-making power of the article τά. It’s more likely that I remembered them because they were both quite short, and perhaps because they appeared to carry a mystery and a whiff of truth in them that I might untangle for myself if only I worked on them long enough. I felt justified in this interpretation when I read in this new text that “nominal sentences are best suited to the impersonal and timeless character of maxims or folk-sayings.” (Mollin and Williamson at 31)

Friendship Ways by John Willson

Most of us learn about friendship from our families, just as we learn about everything else worth knowing from our families.  Mine is an old New England family, farmers and preachers and doctors and lawyers, and tradesmen, not many in commerce.  Nobody up to my generation was ever rich, nobody particularly poor, so there was comparatively little arrogance and comparatively little envy.

New Englanders were historically family-loyal, but not clan-loyal.  Harriet Beecher Stowe thought that of all the English ideas her ancestors brought with them, that not even democracy was able to “obliterate, was that of family.  Family feeling, family pride, family hope and fear and desire” were what made New England.  My Grandmothers Willson and Fuller, two ladies who could not be more unlike each other, both said, often--no debate--”family first.”

Traditional New Englanders were “town-born” and thus attentive to their neighborhoods and local associations, and more often than not rather interested in the affairs of the comity.  This made them good neighbors but not always good friends.  They might have to stand up in the Congregation and accuse the person next door of some breach of individual or community morality, which called for a certain reserve.  As the half-savage neighbor in Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”