Friendship: the (wrong) idea of a minor feeling of the human soul

A particular book, in which words, reflections, humor, drawings and poetry come together with surprising naturalness: this is "Sincere amicizie" (21lettere, 2022, Euro 19.50, pp. 162) by Jean-Jacques Sempé, one of the most great contemporary illustrators. Starting from his most beautiful and evocative cartoons, in fact, Sempé is questioned by the writer Marc Lecarpentier about a feeling that has accompanied the human being since the dawn of time: friendship. A feeling, that between friends and friends, too often relegated to a secondary role compared to love, a theme that is talked about a lot, too much, sometimes inappropriately. Conversely, little is known about friendship, one takes refuge in proverbs - "whoever finds a friend, finds a treasure" just to mention the most famous - or imagines it as a "minor" feeling of the human soul, especially of facing the upheaval brought about by passion and falling in love.

Yet, it is a high and profound feeling, sometimes even more than love, even if it is extremely fragile. In friendship there are balances that are more delicate and difficult to maintain than in any other relationship. As Jean-Jacques Sempé says: “Nothing is easy in friendship. It takes discretion, modesty, fidelity ... I think it is like the feeling of love: it arrives, it arises on us, then we have to hurry up because there are tasks, commitments, a ritual ... Friendship is a pact that can not be formulated , like an agreement that exists between two beings and that is not enunciated ”.

To counterbalance the words of Sempé there are his cartoons, in which the great cartoonist questions with his benevolent, but at the same time shrewd and mischievous, the different rules that guide human relationships. We know that friendship rests on rituals that gradually inspire complicity and this accomplice intimacy seems to want to convey the author's drawings to us at first sight. But the cartoons of Sempé, with these joyful children walking side by side, the ladies on bicycles, the gentlemen who greet each other from afar, tell the beauty of friendly complicity, but also how difficult it is to have a lasting, deep friendship, not linked to moment and gesture ... to transience.

Precisely because this great cartoonist places friendship among the highest feelings, his drawings seem to want to remind us how little it takes to crack a relationship: a gesture, an envy, a word out of place. In the end Sempé seems to propose idyllic little pictures in which human beings move in ecstatic atmospheres, full, still of time. The stroke of his drawing, the few words of his protagonists remind us how fragile and slippery friendship, especially between adults, is often devoid of that innate and naive spontaneity, of that timelessness that accompanies children. In short, as Sempé affirms and his cartoons show us: "Succeeding in a sincere friendship relationship that resists our nonsense could be a great challenge".