Which detail best shapes the idea that honesty is important in friendship? excerpt 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 I 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
luxury allowed, but diadems and authority, only to the highest 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 fend the approach of our
fellow-man by compliments, by gossip, by amusements, by affairs. We cover up our thought from him 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,