Excerpt from The Business of Being a Friend AN essay on the stupendous and fasci nating experiences of friendship usually takes one of three forms. Following Plato or Swedenborg, one may try to scale its mystic heights. Failing this, one may try to reduce it to simpler terms by medical or sociological analysis; result: the insipid or nauseous mess just now so annoyingly familiar. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.