a letter in a bottle

Sad indeed how, in their self-absorption and masks, people here seem so pitifully blind to its signs, to its precarious conditions of possibility.

To the intimate bonds of trust, to the promise and risk of close friendship.

To the last remains of our humanity.

A letter put in a bottle and cast into the sea; or an extended hand, half waving, half drowning -- so endangered and fragile has it become.


And thus all the more precious.

*       *       *

It has long seemed to me that a friendship where one does not teach one another becomes shallow and meaningless. Everyone who, while wandering along the shore of whatever continent or island, has found a letter put in a bottle and cast into the sea, has found a friend.

--Alphonso Lingis, Abuses (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. viii.