Blest be the tie that binds

“Blest be the tie that binds” is the phrase Tommy Dukes uses to open a Sunday-evening conversation about love. Rather than affirming a secure bond, it prompts him to ask what, in practice, holds people together. His answer is deliberately unsettling: among the intellectuals gathered around him, the tie is less affection than mental friction, spite, and envy.

The Phrase in Conversation

Tommy introduces the line with a jokingly incomplete continuation, “Our hearts in kindred something-or-other,” turning a familiar-sounding expression of fellowship into an occasion for doubt. He asks what the tie actually is, then describes the company as pulling at one another through argument. Apart from that friction, he says, there is “damned little tie” between them: they either part after saying spiteful things or conceal their hostility beneath false sweetness.

Spite as a Form of Attachment

Tommy’s account makes antagonism evidence of connection, but a compromised kind. The speakers’ arguments keep them engaged with one another even as they threaten to drive them apart. He argues that intellectual life has roots in spite and envy, and invokes the quarrels around Socrates as an example of the pleasure people can take in dismantling another person’s ideas. His appeal to recognize a tree by its fruit makes the group’s habitual hostility a test of what its celebrated mental life produces.

Fellowship and False Sweetness

When Clifford protests that the group is not entirely spiteful, Tommy includes himself in the indictment and says he is worse than anyone else. He prefers spontaneous spite to “concocted sugaries,” which he calls poisonous. In his view, flattering assurances that Clifford is a fine fellow would be less honest—and less meaningful—than open criticism. The phrase about a tie that binds is therefore left unresolved: the discussion exposes friction as the company’s most tangible bond, while offering no evidence that it can supply the tenderness or fellowship the words seem to promise. Tommy’s contrast with Buddha sitting quietly under a tree and Jesus telling peaceful stories sharpens the gap between those ideals and the group’s combative talk.