I’ve been thinking recently about the concept of friendship in relationship to Robert Lax. When Lax and I exchanged letters, he would ask me about friends I’d mentioned to him even though he’d never met them. And in conversation, he talked about his old friends as if I’d known them too. I suppose we all do this to some extent, but with Lax it seemed as if he saw the connections of friendship as one vast web or pool, with all of us in it at the same time.
I wrote about many of Lax’s friendships in Pure Act and made a point of highlighting the friendship aspect of his relationship with Merton. I also mentioned that he had hundreds of correspondents, many of whom had never met him. Some of them write to me still, marveling that he wrote back when they wrote to him and even more that he carried on a correspondence with them as long as they continued to write to him.
What I’ve been thinking lately is that friendship was the holy ground of life for Lax. It was the place he saw God. This may sound odd when talking about a man who chose to live alone on an island far from most of those he knew. But Lax often spoke of being alone for others. He spent his aloneness loving not only God but also those he felt were made in God’s image. Which is all of us.
I don’t think Lax would have been surprised at all if he had rounded one of those whitewashed buildings in the port town of Skala and run into his Uncle Henry or his cousin Bob Mack or his college roommate Seymour Freedgood. He was a man of presence, and, strange as it may sound, presence didn’t require being physically present.
Presence meant being present to the fullness, humanness, and godliness of a person, whether that person was with you or not. Having shared presence with someone in any way, whether through time together or correspondence or simply a mutual friend’s loving story, Lax felt an enduring connection to that person.
This presence, I believe, is why he could be so intuitive in letters and why his life was one long series of serendipitous connections. Lax didn’t need to look forward to a heaven where he would reunite with people he loved; he was with them all the time already. Just as I feel every day that he is with me now.
When love is multifarious and indiscriminate, when it flows out like a flood that embraces rather than overwhelms, when it encompasses presence and patience and positivity, believing the best in those it meets and keeping them continually in one’s mind and heart, it takes no heed of barriers of time or space or life or death.
It becomes endless, enduring, and eternal, all at once. That’s how Lax loved.
(This post was adapted from a piece in the Summer 2024 issue of The Robert Lax Newsletter. To subscribe to this free quarterly email publication, click here.