I originally intended to write a series of profiles of the friends I lost to the strange new belief system that stalks our times, just like Czeslaw Milosz documented the way his peers—Alpha the Moralist, Beta the Disappointed Lover, Gamma the Slave of History, Delta the Troubadour—caved in to Stalinism in The Captive Mind. Milosz saw some of his most brilliant friends and colleagues drawn like moths to a flame: “We must not treat this desire for self-immolation lightly.”
Then I realized the people I knew best, whose words and actions so confounded me, didn’t lend themselves to such portraits. They were not intellectuals, much less poets. And I was no Milosz either.
Still, what happened to certain friends of mine interests me. We traveled together through young adulthood and then abruptly parted ways. In another time, we might have stayed friends into old age, or drifted gently from the center of one another’s lives to the periphery.
How is it that so many bonds that did not seem fragile broke?
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to gender:hacked by Eliza Mondegreen to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.