What is the central idea of the passage?
from Friendship
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are two elements that go to the composition of friendship,
each so sovereign, that I can detect no superiority in either, no
reason why either should be first named. One is Truth. A friend is
a person with whom I may be sincere.
Before him, I may think
aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and
equal that may drop even those undermost garments of
dissimulation, courtesy,
and second thought, which men never
put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness,
with which one chemical atom
meets another. Sincerity is the
authority, only to the highest
luxury allowed, but diadems and
rank, that being permitted to
speak truth as having none above it
to court or
conform unto. Every man alone is sincere.
At the
entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins. We parry and our fellow-man by compliments, by gossip,
fend the approach of
affairs. We cover up
our thought from him
by amusements, by under a hundred folds. I knew a man who, under a certain
religious frenzy,
cast off this drapery, and omitting all compliments
and commonplace, spoke to
the conscience of every person he
encountered, and that with great insight and beauty.