Last August I stood at a guestbook table on a beautiful island in the Pacific Northwest, pen in hand, as my creative mind went completely blank. Behind me a line was forming — patient at first, then, I suspect, less so — and I was holding up the entire operation because I could not, for the life of me, write a single sentence in a wedding guestbook. It wasn't writer's block. I knew exactly what I felt, tears welling in my eyes. I just didn't have the words for it.

The groom was one of my purest friends. We were young men who had known many great adventures together. We had logged enough highway miles together to wear out a set of tires and most of our opinions on everything. We had climbed mountains. We had stood on a widow's walk in Nantucket, staring out at the Atlantic, pontificating about the world with the confidence of two guys who had not yet been humbled by it. We had shared countless meals in countless cities. At my own wedding, years earlier, he had held court in the lobby of a Marriott well past midnight — barefoot, a glass of wine in each hand, presiding over a circle of people he'd met four hours ago as though he'd known them his whole life. Some people walk into your life like that. Bright and endearing. And meant, you realize later, to never leave.

So there I was at his wedding, gifted with the opportunity to witness him marry a spectacular woman who was clearly, luminously right for him, and I felt something that most wedding guests know well. I can only describe it as a swell — a rising in the chest, warm and pressurized, like the moment before you cry except you're smiling. Not pride, exactly, because I had nothing to do with it. Not happiness, because that word is too shallow, too much like a greeting card. It was joy, but a specific kind: joy at his joy. Joy that his story was arcing the way it should. A quiet, almost reverent peace in the flourishing of a great friend.

I probably wrote something forgettable in the guestbook, surrendering to the pen and to the increasingly restless woman behind me, and I went to find my seat. But the feeling stayed.

Here is a problem with the English language: we have, by some estimates, over 170,000 words in current use. The Scots alone have forty-seven words for rain. We have limerence for the ache of early infatuation and frisson for the shiver that runs through you when music or beauty catches you off guard.

And yet, as far as I have looked, we have no word — not one — for the feeling of joy at someone else's good news. For the specific, involuntary happiness that overtakes you when a person you love is doing very, very well.

I tried the thesaurus, too. Happiness is too vague. Pride implies ownership. Vicarious makes it sound secondhand, like you're borrowing their experience rather than having your own. Empathy is close but tilts toward connoting suffering — we empathize with pain far more naturally than with delight. The English language, it turns out, is better equipped for grief than for gladness - imagine that. We have built an entire vocabulary around sharing in someone's sorrow and almost nothing for sharing in their joy.

Other cultures noticed this gap and filled it. You may have heard the IOC president, in her opening ceremony address just days ago, reference the African philosophy of Ubuntu — I am because we are. A small grammatical shift that carries an enormous assumption: your flourishing and mine are not separate accounts. They are the same ledger.

The Buddhists call it mudita — sympathetic joy, one of the four highest states of the human heart. Desmond Tutu, in his conversations with the Dalai Lama, connected the two traditions directly: mudita, he said, is simply Ubuntu in practice.

But I’ve discovered that it was a German — because of course it was a German — who gave the feeling its sharpest name.

It was Nietzsche. In December of 1875, Nietzsche sat down to write a letter to his oldest friend, a Prussian aristocrat named Carl von Gersdorff. They had met as teenagers at a boarding school called Pforta, bonded over Schopenhauer and long walks, and remained close even as their lives diverged spectacularly. Gersdorff became a Royal Chamberlain — settled, successful, respectable. Nietzsche became Nietzsche — restless, brilliant, increasingly alone, writing books that almost no one read initially, descending into what must have felt like a vast and indifferent silence.

And yet, in this letter, Nietzsche doesn't complain. He thanks Gersdorff. "With everything that pleases me," he writes, "I think, how Gersdorff will be pleased with it!" And then he names the thing: "You have the glorious capacity for Mitfreude — shared joy. I think it is even rarer and nobler than that of co-suffering."

Mitfreude. Literally: with-joy. The opposite of Schadenfreude.

Nietzsche didn't coin this word in a treatise. He didn't arrive at it through argument. He found it in his friend — in the specific experience of being known by someone whose first instinct, upon hearing good news, was to feel it with you. He went further in a supplement to Human, All Too Human, calling the capacity to imagine and rejoice in another's happiness "the highest privilege of the highest animals" and "a rare human thing." This from the philosopher of the will to power. The man whom the world knows for declaring God dead. His vision of the peak of human achievement was not strength or independence or conquest. It was the ability to feel a swell of joy at a friend's good fortune.

Years later, after a long silence between them, Gersdorff sent Nietzsche a card. Nietzsche's response: "I was quite beside myself with pleasure — I ran through the streets of Genoa with such a happy face that people looked at me in astonishment; at last I held a handkerchief in front of my face."

The philosopher of the will to power, grinning so hard in the streets of Genoa that strangers stared, because he got a letter from an old friend.

My friend now has a daughter on the way. I have a newborn son. We are both, suddenly and irreversibly, in the business of modeling — of being watched by people too small to understand what they're seeing but too absorbent not to absorb it.

I think about this now when I think about friendship — not in the abstract, but in the dailiness of it. We celebrate friends who would die for each other. Every great friendship story in the Western canon is a crisis story: Damon and Pythias, Achilles and Patroclus, Seth Rogen and whichever equally irresponsible friend he's evading gunfire with this time. Would you take a bullet for your best friend? That's the question we know how to ask.

But the better question, the harder and more ordinary one, is: can you hear your friend's good news and feel nothing but that swell? No envy, no comparison, no quiet arithmetic of your life against theirs — just the grin, the warmth, the rising thing in your chest that has no name in English?

Nietzsche was right that this is the rarer thing. And it's rarer because it can't be performed in a single dramatic gesture. It has to be practiced, over years, in the undramatic moments when a friend's life is simply going well. It has to be chosen. And the choosing has to be seen — by the people at your dinner table, by the children too young to know they're learning what love between friends looks like.

So here is the only exhortation I'll offer: pursue the friendships that make you swell. The ones that turn you into Nietzsche in the streets of Genoa — grinning so stupidly you have to cover your face. Not because those friendships are pleasant, though they are. Not because they are virtuous, though they are. But because Mitfreude, once practiced, ripples. The people who see it in you — especially the smallest ones — inherit it without being taught.

Return to old watering holes, the proverb says, for more than water. Return for the grin. Return for the swell. The smallest people at your table are learning what friendship looks like, and Mitfreude — once they see it — becomes the kind of thing that doesn't need to be taught.

John

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John Conrad