From “The Four Loves”

When I spoke of friends as side by side or shoulder to shoulder I was pointing out a necessary contrast between their posture and that of lovers whom we picture as face to face. Beyond that contrast I do not want the image pressed. The common quest or vision wich unites Friends does not absorb them is such a way that they remain ignorant or oblivious to one another. On the contrary it is the very medium in which their mutual love and knowledge exist. One knows nobody so well as ones “fellow.” Every step of the common journey tests his metal; and the tests are tests we fully understand because we are undergoing them ourselves. Hence, as he rings true time after time, or reliance, our respect and our admiration blossom into an Appreciative love of a singularly robust and well-informed kind. If, at the outset, we had attended more to him and less to the thing our Friendship is “about,” we should not have come to know or love him so well. You will not find the warrior, the poet, the philosopher or the Christian by staring in his eyes as if he were your mistress: better fight beside him, read with him, argue with him, pray with him.
In a perfect Friendship this Appreciative love is, I think, often so great and so firmly based that each member of the circle feels, in his secret heart, humbled before all the rest. Sometimes he wonders what he is doing there among his betters. He is lucky beyond all desert to be in such company. Especially when the whole group is together, each bringing out all that is best, wisest, or funniest in all the others. Those are golden sessions; when four or five of us after a hard days walking have come to our inn; when our slippers are on, our feet spread out toward the blaze and our drinks at our elbows; when the whole world, and something beyond the world, opens itself to our minds as we talk…

-C.S. Lewis