Friendship In Mitch Albom's 'Tuesdays With Morrie'

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Recommended: Use of Symbolism

In Tuesdays With Morrie, Mitch Albom meets with his favorite college professor who taught him at Brandeis University. Mitch and Morrie always had a unique relationship, a friendship that you don’t really see between a student and a professor. Many years after graduating Mitch finds out that Morrie was diagnosed with Lou Gherigs Disease which slowly breaks your body down until you eventually die. Mitch is a famous sports beat writer that never really had free time, but when he heard this news he felt he had to pay Morrie a visit. In the first visit Mitch has a flashback on his graduation day. In a student-teacher relationship it is normally just distant and professional, but on that day Morrie gives Mitch a briefcase which has his initials on it. The briefcase is a symbol of the friendship that they had. They both decide to meet every Tuesday to have a final class about life, a class that has no grades and instead of graduation, it will be a funeral.
A major theme in the book is how Mitch lives his life prior to the meetings with Morrie. He works for the media, which could also be viewed as a symbol. Work takes up so much of his life and he doesn’t have time to live as the way that Morrie did. Morrie despised the mediea, believing that it was driven by greed, violence, and superficiality. He was encouraged by Morrie to quit his job, and it was the his office went on strike and left him jobless where he really discovered lifes meaning. Morries told Mitch a quote from a poem by his favorite author W.H. Auden, which read “ In the absence of Love, there is a void that can be filled only by loving human relationships.” Morie tells Mitch “When love abounds, a person can experience no higher sense of fulfillment.” Morrie believed that...

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...ho experiences love for the first time. The boy she likes doesn’t feel the same way about her. She is so hurt that she wants to speed up life to end it. Victor is a millionaire who is dying of cancer and wants his body to be frozen so in the future his cancer is healed and he has another life time to live.
The Lesson in this book is to show people to live in the moment and not worry about the future, because in order for the future to be great we have to make sure that the present is good. More often, people should take a moment to reflect life. I’m guilty of wishing that there was more time in a day, and as a college student I know that pretty much everyone else wishes for that too. A quote from this book that I’ve grown to appreciate is “When you are measuring life, you are not living it”. Time is precious and we need to take advantage of what we have.

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