Meeting Friends Late In Life

A rooster on Ramona St.
in Portland, OR

Despite the appearance of the words Meeting and Friends in the title, this post is not about Quakerism.  

Yesterday in the book Stoner, by John Williams, the main character, who is a university professor of English, meets a new colleague and hopes to become friends with him.

"It was some time before Stoner recognized the source of his attraction to Lomax. In Lomax's arrogance, his fluency, and his cheerful bitterness, Stoner saw, distorted but recognizable, an image of his friend David Masters. He wished to talk to him as he had talked to Dave; but he could not, even after he admitted his wish to himself. The awkwardness of his youth had not left him, but the eagerness and straightforwardness that might have made the friendship possible had. He knew what he wished was impossible, and the knowledge saddened him."

Why should it have to be impossible? I too am saddened by the idea that friendships which start later in life are doomed to remain shallow. I marked this passage in the book before I read the following passage this morning in an essay, published originally in 1975, about a friendship with WH Auden:

I met Auden late in his life and mine—at an age when the easy, knowledgeable intimacy of friendships formed in one’s youth can no longer be attained, because not enough life is left, or expected to be left, to share with another. Thus, we were very good friends but not intimate friends. 

I think both Hannah Arendt (the author of the essay on Auden) and Stoner present outdated and unnecessarily limiting points of view on friendship. 
What if the friends are not the same age? If one is older, are they limited by the perceived length of that person's time on earth?
Why not go into friendship assuming that this connection will be deep and fulfilling, and see what happens? 

When I was in college I read this quote: 

One friend in a lifetime is much, two are many, three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.

read This "parallelism of life" seems to be the key to friendship to me, not any requirement of age or length of time being friends. If I share current pursuits with another, regardless of the difference in our ages or the different paths we have trod until this moment, there is rich potential for friendship. 

The "community of thought" seems to say that we need to be thinking about some of the same things, so we have things to talk about and reflect on. Again, this does not require similar age or deep history. I don't know what he means by "a rivalry of aim". That we are seeking ends that are in competition with one another? I confess I do not see how that contributes to friendship. 

Except that with teacher friends, there is always a healthy nugget of comparison and competition when we talk about what's going on in our conversations, which I think productively goads each of us toward better expression of our ideas and better practice in the classroom. That rivalry adds a forward motion to the friendship which I feel is worth quite a lot.