I've been no fan of the anthology Foundation's Friends, for sure. You can find a copy for a couple of bucks and free shipping online, but it's totally not worth it...despite the impressive array of talent listed on the table of contents. I continued to slog through it only because I am very OCD about some things, and I wanted to read "the complete" Foundation series...or at least what I deemed to be the complete series, since definitions of that vary wildly. If I'd been reading from any other perspective, I would have quit much earlier on. Probably after the first ten pages, because it was around that point that I realized that this was a real shit show.
But being me, I read on. And now I'm reading my last story in it. (I jumped ahead a bit out of sheer frustration, so my last story is not THE last story in the book.) It's "The Originist," written by Orson Scott Card.
I know Orson Scott Card a little bit, having read Ender's Game (pretty good) and Speaker For the Dead (superb), so I was hoping that this story would leave a less acrid taste in my mouth than any of the previous outings. And pretty much from the get go, I found that to be true. For one thing, this story was actually set in the Foundation Universe. (You'd think that that would've been a given, referencing the title of the anthology, but turns out there were only three of such included...and the other two of them were very short and pretty useless.) For another thing, Orson Scott Card is a good writer...and he didn't peel something off the bottom of his DISCARD pile for this anthology--as I suspect several other writers did.
Anyway...like all good writers, Orson Scott Card can't help making wise comments about Life in his story. Specifically comments about relationships. There was some very good stuff about doing things you didn't want to do because your significant other wanted to do them--gladly making sacrifices for love, in other words--which I almost quoted, since that struck very near to the heart of my second failed marriage, but I ended up letting it ride. No use kicking the bones of the dead, right?
But this bit. Oh, my. Yes, I had to capture this bit:
"Thus he discovered what he supposed all faithful men eventually discover - that no human relationship is ever anything but tentative. There is no such thing as an unbreakable bond between people.... Nothing can last. Nothing is, finally, what it once seemed to be.... Anyone who thinks he has a perfect marriage, a perfect friendship, a perfect trust of any kind, he only believes this because the stress that will break it has not yet come. He might die with the illusion of happiness, but all he has proven is that sometimes death comes before betrayal. If you live long enough, betrayal will inevitably come."
Now admittedly that is some cold, cold shit, but...in my experience, it's at least 70% true of friendships, and 100% true of romantic relationships. And I just have to wonder if maybe admitting this "fact" could lead to better relationships? It seems to me that confidence might be the root of all relationship trouble. If you feel sure that the bond you have with The Other is absolutely certain, then you start to allow yourself to be less than careful sometimes, and that means you start to treat that Other with less than the care that you would if you thought the relationship was less stable.
Something to think about, anyway.
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