So, So Proud

Snippets from a paper Lawrence wrote (about which he writes, "I wrote a paper [of course I'm attaching it--kind of like sending my grades to my parents!] where I basically tried to channel you."):

"Just as we need our mothers and fathers to know who we are, we need friends when those bonds weaken, which will happen as we move outside the family. In other words, we need friends to give us coherence between the time we leave our parent’s household and we start our own household. This need is becoming more apparent during a time when marriage is increasingly postponed and loneliness is ubiquitous. Friendship is a non-physical (and, in this respect, non-natural) relationship of dependence which carries on the logic of dependence found in the family. It is also the beginning of starting new physical relationships of dependence, that is, a new generation in a family, for marriages (physical relationships of dependence) in most western societies are born out of friendships. Friendship sustains us in our post-family lives and propels us into new families. The existing relationships with one’s parents and grandparents do not wholly break down, and neither should they, but the reality of post-industrial America says that those bonds will, indeed, weaken."
...
"Moreover, a friendship between men and women highlights this. Even as there is a radical difference in the identity of men and women, which is created in the negation of the other (i.e. man is not woman and woman is not man), there is a radical sameness in that they are both human. What must be maintained is that difference and sameness are parasitic concepts: to say there is difference you must have a conception of sameness; to say there is sameness you must have a conception of difference. In a lived way, friendship recognizes that we are autonomous agents who exist as dependent creatures—we have creaturely agency."