You have friends. Or you wish you did. But when was the last time anyone talked with you about how to be one?

We are more connected than any generation before us, and yet more of us feel alone. We have learned to network and to follow — and somewhere along the way, many of us mislaid the older, harder art of simply being a friend.

Friendship in a Lonely Age is a return to that art. Part meditation and part memoir, it draws on conversations with more than two dozen friends and on a long tradition of reflective writing that reaches from Cicero and the desert mystics through Whitman, Thoreau, and Steinbeck, and on to living voices like the Franciscan Richard Rohr.

It begins close in, with the friendships between two people — the ones that sustain us that we call our best, the ones that fail, the work of befriending, especially, ourselves. Then the circle widens: to the stranger we have no reason to welcome, to the natural world we live within, to the friend who falls ill and needs our care, and to the teachers and guides who help us become more wholly ourselves. What begins as a book about friendship becomes a book about how to be consciously present to everything.

Honest about the friendships that fail and generous toward the ones that endure, written with warmth, candor, and hard-won humility, this is a book to read slowly and return to — a companion for anyone who suspects that friendship is not a pleasant addition to a well-lived life, but close to the heart of one.

Ten illustrations by Kahlil Gibran, the artist and poet who gave us The Prophet, open the chapters.

Ten chapters, each opened by one of these illustrations, with accessible notes at the close of every chapter and a Resources for Action guide to carry the book’s ideas into practice.

Written under the name A. Frynd — Middle English for “friend” — by an author who chose anonymity so the book might belong to its readers rather than to a reputation.