Notes toward a Conclusion

Abstract

Social changes, like conclusions for books, are rarely easy. Some suggest they come in waves; others, such as Zora Neale Hurston (1.942), view the process as a slow plow sowed among friends who will hopefully meet at a barbeque when all is said and done. Such rituals help us bind our lives together, connecting our bodies in space and time as we seek to know each other and become friends. Here friendships help us find new ways of engaging the world. After all, every relationship takes a dialectical shape from formation to conflict to either a resolution and some sort of new awareness or a rupture. These transformations have been the subject of the rebel friendships, including my own, traced throughout this story.