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Excerpt from "The Unbroken Continuum: Booth/Gregory on Teaching and Ethical Criticism," Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 7.1 (Winter 2007): 49-60.

In Aristotle's sense, the best friendships constitute an ethical commitment to the tending and care of each other not for either friend's private pleasure, power, or good but for the befriended person's well-being and for the shared pleasure that the friend takes in helping the befriended one become the best possible version of himself. As Aristotle says, "Friendships of this kind involve equality; for the friends get the same things from one another and wish the same things for one another" (1952: 1158b). The best friendship, then, is the relationship of equals whose main activity is an intensely personal, loving but nonerotic sharing of ideas and interests such that the sharing becomes for each participant the very mechanism for ethical improvement of each other's character. This is the kind of friendship I speak of when I say that Booth and I were friends, and this is what I mean when I say that our friendship had everything to do with the nature, content, and process of our collaboration about ideas, criticism, and teaching.

Having said this, however, it still remains true that deep friendships have a significance for the participants that cannot be captured fully by descriptive analysis. We did enjoy each other's personalities. including our quirks, and Booth, who was profoundly humane and compassionate and capable of great anger but never capable of malice, was delightfully quirky. No matter how many times I told him he needed to get rid of his ancient, dysfunctional lawn mower and that cast-iron Dutch oven in his kitchen, the one with the cracked lid that hid out in his cupboard behind the modern, stainless steel pots like a battered relative who had led a derelict life, Booth could never stand to toss either item because (it turns out) both of these items had originally belonged to Paul Gauguin's son - they were left in the house that the Booths bought from Gauguin's son when Booth took his first teaching job at Haverford College in 1951 - and it amused Booth to say that he mowed his lawn and simmered his stew with items that had once belonged to Paul Gauguin's son. Now that's quirky, but it's a quirkiness that is like the knot in the grain of a finely turned wooden bowl that gives the whole bowl character, interest, and value.

© 2007 Copyright Marshall Gregory