Guests at a Banquet, tempera facsimile by Nina de Garis Davies after a fourteenth-century-BC Egyptian frieze, c. 1920.

Guests at a Banquet, tempera facsimile by Nina de Garis Davies after a fourteenth-century-bc Egyptian frieze, c. 1920. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1930.

Friendship

Volume XIV, Number 2 | spring 2021

Miscellany

Friendship cannot exist “between the well-fed, prosperous / and the lean and down-and-out in the world,” states the Panchatantra, a collection of Indian animal fables from around the third century bc. In one story, when a crow tries to befriend a mole after witnessing his impressive skill in escaping from hunters’ traps, the mole exclaims, “You are the eater; I am the food. What kind of friendship can exist between us?”

Friend! It is a common word, often lightly used. Like other good and beautiful things, it may be tarnished by careless handling.

—Harriet Jacobs, 1861

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The World in Time

Ben Jealous

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with the author of Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing. More