A Remembrance of Andres on His Birthday

On my birthday last November, I had turned off my audible phone notifications to attend to those more private anniversary moments with my dear. After pastry and a chai at the Black Walnut Café and just before our walk at Lake of the Isles, I felt a vibration next to my heart and pulled my phone from the breast pocket of my jacket. A call from my friend Andres in Vancouver. Curious. We were not in the habit of talking on the phone. Just occasional texts and other sorts of brief electronic messaging. The soft buzzing ceased. Probably a quick birthday greeting, though we were not in the habit of birthday greetings either other than a Facebook emoji. Maybe an additional comment. An exchange of erudite literary witticisms. All was well with our friendship. All was always well. I would touch base with him later. While the phone was still in my hand, it buzzed again signaling that a voicemail message had been received, a transcripted portion of which I could read in the little window on my iphone, “I am leaving this world in about seven hours.”

I called back. Terminal cancer, assisted suicide. We talked for fifteen minutes, of mutual love and excruciating heartbreak. He was one of those kindred spirits for me, an instant friend, a long-lost brother. We did not enact friendship or brotherhood the way it is spoken of in popular culture or even in the more serious, philosophical treatments of that subject. Our bond was largely unspoken, but felt and appreciated all the more, perhaps, for its mute power over certain difficult circumstances, some distance, and almost twenty years. Few, if any women, I’ve known understand this very particular kind of masculine vibe. They might even deny that it’s friendship. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s something else entirely, something that remains nameless in any language I know. All I know is that if there is an afterlife worth a damn, I’ll see him in it, and we’ll live all the lives of that “friendship”—for there will be more than one—in their fullness, fullnesses simply unachievable in what we understand as real life. Until then, my friend. 

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Volume III of Monsieur’s memoirs accounts for his years in Restoration politics and diplomacy. Of diplomacy he could claim some insight and success, less of politics. His disillusionment was pretty complete; his times as much of a political mess as our own. History went on in spite of, or because of, people’s stupidity and lack of virtue. There is a Volume IV after all, as yet unavailable.

Religion is the wellspring of freedom.

What is base does not have the power to debase; honor alone can inflict dishonor.

Duty is therefore a most positive fact, since it gives human society the only lasting existence it can enjoy.

Whoever fulfills his duties wins esteem; whoever yields to his interests is esteemed very little.

Men love a spectacle, and especially a death, when it is that of a great man.

Sleep devours existence, which is what’s wonderful about it: “The hours are short and life is long,” as Fénelon says.

Happy are they on whom age works like wine, and who lose their memory when they’ve drunk their fill of days!

Every lie repeated becomes a truth: it would be impossible to have too much contempt for human opinions.

All the English are mad, either by nature or by dint of following fashion.

A man must simply go on living if he wishes to find the debris of one century cast by time’s waves upon the shore of another.

Events separate us from the world; politics produces solitaries as religion does anchorites.

Man is as much deceived by the granting of his wishes as by their disappointment.

We don’t like a man to despise what we worship or think himself entitled to insult our mediocre lives.

An honest man is always sure of being understood by an honest man.

One might say they were pouring money on the arts in order to extinguish them, as they do on our freedoms to stifle them…

I am unfortunately fashioned; the injuries inflicted on me never heal.

When all is said and done, is there anything for which it is worth the bother of getting out of bed nowadays?

It would be better to be more humble, more prostrate, more Christian. Unfortunately, I am subject to weakness; I am nowhere near the Gospels’ perfection. If a man struck me on the cheek, I should not turn to him the other. [A triple]

At the end of your life, it is all time lost.

Once liberty has vanished, a man may still have a country, but the homeland is nowhere to be found.

We do not breathe our last where and when we please.

These men of triumph could never accustom themselves to reversals.

Prosperity does not recognize his sister Adversity.

Death does not care one jot what we have been.

I visited a beautiful cemetery: I never forget the dead.

We always win more by our faults than our good qualities.

Nothing is so sad as rereading, as your days draw to a close, what you wrote in your youth: all that was in the present is now in the past.

The only thing I want in this world is to return to my solitude and wash my hands of politics.

There is nothing good save retirement, and nothing real save a friendship like yours.

Indifference, I admit, is one of the qualities of statesmen, but of statesmen without conscience.

Love, according to Socrates, is the desire to be reborn by means of beauty.

A revolution is a jubilee; it absolves everyone from every crime, licensing greater ones.

There was a chance of success: there is always a chance of success when men act with courage.

Nothing is great today because nothing is lofty.

It is better to lose one’s life than to beg for it.

A representative republic is, without doubt, the future state of the world, but its time has not yet come.

I think, in the final analysis, the old society is finished.