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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
Ken Knisley, or Friendship3/05/2008 21:53:20I've just discovered something amazing: for me, at least, and a few old friends. My introduction to thinking about things—it is truly nothing less—came from a man named Ken Knisley, a taxi driver and television show host who taught an occasional class at my high school in Arlington, Virginia. When I was in tenth grade, at age 15, I took a class on existentialism with him. It was my first exposure to so much: Kierkegaard, Kafka, Camus, Heidegger, and even Kurt Vonnegut. No, not the thinkers themselves so much (I've since tired of some of them), but the thinking, the joy of talking. And more, the responsibility and opportunity we each have to probe deeply into our existences.  The whole second half of the course, I recall, was severely distracted because Ken couldn't keep from going on tangents about how amazed he was by his young son.We kept in touch a little after that. I took another class with him senior year, though I left early to spend two weeks in a nearby monastery (where I met the next great teacher of my life, Brother Benedict Simmonds). He gave me a few books. We met for coffee a few years later. But then, when I was a senior in college, I got an email that caught me totally off guard. Ken had died of cancer. Neither I nor my fellow disciple Alexa had any idea it was coming. We lived in the same city then, so I called her and told her. We sat on the phone in silence for a long time and then she went off, I was later told, to do something crazy.  So this is what I just discovered in the course of wandering through the internet, quite unknowingly: Just before his death, Ken created a blog. "A Well Lit Room," it was called. It had just one post, titled "No Abstraction." It stated, simply, "This is the begining." [sic]But the real treasure is in the comments. As usual, pay attention to the footnotes. There, Ken writes about what would be the last days of his life. He describes going to his treatments, struggling all the while with the relevance to it of the ideas he loved. His friends chime in. At one point, after he goes into surgery to remove the kidney, things look good. The kidney is out, and Ken is awake. But then, "This is Thursday, September 29 [2005], 1:42 AM, and this is the end." Read it if you like. I can't begin to say what this man taught me. Read the sentimental comments by friends at the end of all this to get an idea of it. To speak of Ken requires, one way or another, speaking of Socrates. Ken looked like Socrates, as you can see in his famous episode on The Cave. And he acted like Socrates. Maybe he even died that way, I don't know. He was similarly obnoxious. Minding my own business before all this, over the weekend I finally got to reading Plato's dialog, Lysis, or Friendship. I was in a house with many beautiful books from boutique presses, and this is the one I decided to spend a few hours with. And now, with Ken's final mantra, "No abstraction," running through my head, so also does Socrates. Critical backstory aside, the core of the dialog is Socrates's conversation about the nature of friendship with two teenage boys, Lysis and Menexenus. As usual, the discussion is utterly abstract. Not what this friendship is or how to make it better, but what friendship is ultimately, in its purest essence. Over the course of it, they test out a number of options. Maybe friendship is the attraction of good to good, but what need has good of anything more? Maybe it is the need of evil for good, but then why would the good bother? Or maybe it is what is congenial to the good, and on and on. Together, Socrates and the boys take each possibility to its reasonable conclusion and find it leads to trouble. In the end, in the last sentence of the dialog, they are left with a troubling conclusion. O Menexenus and Lysis, how ridiculous that you two boys, and I, an old boy, who would fain be one of you, should imagine ourselves to be friends—this is what the by-standers will go away and say—and as yet we have not been able to discover what is a friend! We know that we are friends: look at us. We are talking about friendship, and enjoying it. It is clear for all to see, even the bystanders. Yet friendship itself, we still are ignorant of it! How is this possible? How can we be what we do not begin to comprehend? To me, this dialog reads as a wonderful comedy. It reveals the joy of thinking. Ken: where are you in this? Here, in the joy of thinking. In the realness of illness, he seemed to beg for an end to abstraction. Yet where did he turn, most reliably, and where did his friends turn after he passed? To abstraction. He to his friends and philosophers. And his friends, when he was gone, missed the playful talk. And so both wild-haired philosophers come to their limits. Abstraction, it turns out, is anything but abstract. It speaks, among friends, in the very language we will carry through our deaths. * More about Ken, on NPR and in the Washington Post.
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