Abstract
McClay talks about the concept of friends. Friend embraces a particularly large portfolio of evasions and line-blurring maneuvers, especially useful in the hands of diffident teenagers. Friendship represents a rare kind of freedom, an "exquisite arbitrariness and irresponsibility," as Lewis puts it, precisely because it liberates us into a way of being fully human that rises above all the desiderata and conditioning factors that otherwise impinge upon people, the very factors that form what they are now accustomed to call our "identity."