Companio

The word company--and incidentally all of it's etymological cousins--is pretty easy to break down: con - with, pan - bread, which is to say company is the people you break bread with. In its original Latin usage, it referred to the first subvision of an army, who all ate together, a usage that is to this day preserved in military terminology.

In America, companies, in the business sense, don't do much to preserve this original notion. Most people feel little or no loyalty to their place of business, and as such tend to separate their work lives from their private lives. In Japan, it once was common for someone (male) to devote their entire life to a company, even going so far as to spend all of their leisure time with work associates. Anymore, this is not as true, but it definitely feels much more palpable here than in the land of my birth.

Scholars of Homeric literature always assume that the strong bonds between men in the Iliad and Odyssey come as a result of certain pressures and shared experiences in battle. Frankly, this is the kind of shit that old school Hellenistics liked to blather on about in Oxbridge and is still to this day carried on among the oral tradition geeks like Lord and Perry, and more recently Foley. The Homeric guy types spend realtively little time fighting together, even in the Iliad where the majority of the narrative is an actual war. What binds these fighters together is that they spend even their "free time" amongst each other. The modern military still abides by this practice, though perhaps without the overt homosexual intercourse.

People do not bond because they share their moments of greatest strength but because they share their moments of weakness and banality. Even the banal seems to me to be more important for determining who are ones true companions, as others always want to bask in the highs and lows but rarely stick around for the truly mundane.

Incidentally, this is my way of saying I'm going to be in AA in September and need a place to stay. I'm perfectly comfortable sleeping on the floor (I live in Japan for Chrissake) and merely need someone to tolerate my presence for about a month. Normally, I'd just impose on Sylwia, but she's too kind to refuse me even when I'm a bother. So, I thought I'd spread the love around. Let me be boring with you.