In hard times, precisely what sustains us is the knowledge of the counsel we have not sought, the friendship of those to whom we have not revealed ourselves, and who thereby empower us without knowing. They give us so much - even our needful strength, even more than our needful strength - in all that they fail to take away. I say "more than our needful strength" to account for the lives that subsist on such a basis, and which seek out no other nourishment than this. Taken at the limit, friendship is in this case a metaphor, and does not have to correspond to anything real. It is enough that the grounds for the metaphor exist, which is to say that it is enough simply that one fails to do everything that one fails to do alone. It is this reckless offering of refusal, in exchange for the power to refuse, that we experience inwardly as the grace of taking away.