Friendship is an obstetric art; it draws out our richest and deepest resources; it unfolds the wings of our dreams and hidden indeterminate thoughts; it serves as a check on our judgments, tries out our new ideas, keeps up our ardor, and enflames our enthusiasm. . .

In any case, even if you are materially isolated, seek out in spirit the society of the friends of the true.  Join their assembly, feel yourself in brotherhood with them and with all the seekers, all the creators that Christianity brings together.  The Communion of Saints is not a phalanstery; nevertheless it is a unity.  “The flesh” -alone- “profiteth nothing”: the spirit, even alone, can do something.  The unanimity which bears fruit consists not so much in being together in one place, or belonging to a group with a label, as in this: that each one should labor with the feeling that others also are laboring, that each one in his place should concentrate on the work while others also are concentrating: so that one task be accomplished, that one principle of life and activity be its guiding spirit; and that the parts of the watch, to each of which a home worker devotes his exclusive attention, be put together by God.

from Sertillanges’s The Intellectual Life, trans. by Mary Ryan