Opinion | Ever Been Jealous of a Friendship?

I’ve long thought Johnson would have taken to Twitter because in his writing he was a master of potent economy. About friends, he said we must take them “such as we can find them, not as we would make them.” Maybe this explains in part why there is pleasure in observing a friendship we are not part of. With our own friends, we are aware of the give and take, the compromises both silent and spoken. But when watching others, we are free to imagine something more perfect.

People have worried about friendship and its role in our lives for centuries. Epicurus believed it was necessary for a happy life. Aristotle believed it was necessary for a good one. Cicero thought life wasn’t worth living without friends. Montaigne thought true friendship occurred only once every 300 years (and he, as one half of a famed friendship with the jurist Étienne, was one of the lucky ones).

The day after his 40th birthday, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “I sometimes awake in the night and think of friendship and its possibilities.” Estranged from Ralph Waldo Emerson by then, he was waiting for an ideal. “I catch an echo of the great strain of Friendship played somewhere, and feel compensated for months and years of commonplace,” he wrote. He never did find it. He died four years later.

Each of us has to decide if the occasional flashes of insight and friendship are worth the commonplace of social media, but I think they might be. Look for the friends, I tell myself and my children. Stay near them. As Montaigne wrote while contemplating the nature of friendship and public performance, “I would rather know the truth” of what Brutus said “in his tent to a close friend the night before a battle, than the speech he made the next day to his army.” It is a surprising feature of these digital platforms that they occasionally let us feel as if we are in the tent.

Eudora Welty also wrote, “Friendship lives, as do we ourselves, in an ephemeral world.” We should enjoy it however we can.

Jessica Francis Kane is the author, most recently, of the novel “Rules for Visiting.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.