In Chinese, the characters to describe the type of intense intellectual bond that transcends words like “friendship” or “romance” mean: “Know yourself.” The term is pronounced zhiji in Mandarin, but the characters—and core meaning—remains the same across other dialects. To know yourself, in other words, depends on recognizing your image reflected in another. In turn, that person sees who you are, or can be, even beyond what you can fathom. You depend on their critique, their encouragement of an entirely new aesthetic way of being. You trust them enough to “know yourself.” English doesn’t have a similar word, but this is exactly the kind of bond that united Wassily Kandinsky and Arnold Schoenberg, whose artistic friendship from 1911 allowed them to distill their own deepest intuitions, and overturn centuries of Western art and music tradition.
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