Today I started reading All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks and it is, of course, immediately electrifying.

The preface begins: 

When I was a child, it was clear to me that life was not worth living if we did not know love. I wish I could testify that I came to this awareness because of the love I felt in my life. But it was love’s absence that let me know how much it mattered.

A similar realization in my own life has come up repeatedly in my posts here. As I wrote last November, “I spent seven years alone, single, basically wanting nothing. What kind of life was I living? What can such a life mean? Now everything that is just for me feels hollow… I realized that even the tremendously self-involved process of transition would have been utterly pointless and meaningless if it didn’t bring me to a place where I was better able to connect with and love others.”

And so “the search for love continues even in the face of great odds." 

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For better or worse, the anchors that keep me afloat have as often as not been pop songs and movies. And when I was reading this at a coffee shop this afternoon, the song "Wonderful World” came on, which always reminds me of this scene in Witness.

It’s a dance tinged with sadness, because that “wonderful world” is not the one that Rachel and John live in, since she is Amish and he is a cop from Philadelphia. They can’t be together. But the world also stands in the way of all of us, now, since, as hooks writes, the world of the present is “no longer a world open to love.” And, as if to illustrate hooks’ point, as I sat in that coffee shop, I heard a man at the next table say that he was once married for four years, and the woman he was talking to said “Pretty good run.” We’re so cynical about love nowadays. Often we don’t even really expect it to last anymore.

Yet love–real, lasting love–is no less vital to our lives than it has ever been, even if we feel threatened by acknowledgments of this. When the artwork declaring that “the search for love continues even in the face of great odds” is painted over, hooks concludes that it is possible “that the men who splashed paint on the wall were threatened by this public confessing of a longing for love–a longing so intense it could not only be spoken but was deliberately searched for.”

A few days ago I had a brief exchange with someone whose public declarations of love and longing I find brave and radical in this world. I told her as much. She said “thank you for saying i am brave. i did not know. maybe i forgot it.” Sometimes I think that’s what the world wants, with all of its distractions; it wants us to forget about love. hooks says that “there are not many public discussions of love in our culture right now” and quotes Harold Kushner as writing, 

I am afraid that we may be raising a generation of young people who will grow up afraid to love, afraid to give themselves completely to another person, because they will have seen how much it hurts to take the risk of loving and have it not work out. I am afraid that they will grow up looking for intimacy without risk, for pleasure without significant emotional investment. They will be so fearful of the pain of disappointment that they will forgo the possibilities of love and joy.

hooks follows up this quote by saying “Young people are cynical about love. Ultimately, cynicism is the great mask of the disappointed and betrayed heart.”

This made me think of the new Jim Jarmusch film Only Lovers Left Alive. In the film, which centers on two people–vampires–who have been in love for a few hundred years, one of them (Adam) frequently rails against what he sees as the zombie culture of the world we live in. In his review for the New York Times, A.O. Scott writes,

“At bottom, it’s a generational protest against the zombie kids and their enablers, digitally distracted creatures who don’t appreciate the tactile, sensual glories of the old things.

I can certainly sympathize, but I’m also a bit unnerved to see one of the avant-garde heroes of my own vampire youth turn conservative.”

But I saw the film as a protest primarily against a culture in which love is devalued. hooks writes,

In an overwhelming number of private conversations and public dialogues, I have given and heard testimony about the mounting lovelessness in our culture and the fear it strikes in everyone’s heart. This despair about love is coupled with a callous cynicism that frowns upon any suggestion that love is as important as work, as crucial to our survival as a nation as the drive to succeed.  

If Adam and Eve are truly the only lovers left alive, then all hope is lost. Thank goodness they’re not. But we don’t know how to really deal with love, as a topic, as an idea, as a major issue in our lives. As hooks writes, “When I talked of love with my generation, I found it made everyone nervous or scared, especially when I spoke about not feeling loved enough… most folks were just frightened of what might be revealed in any exploration of the meaning of love in our lives." 

hooks writes that during a health crisis that occurred when she was nearing forty, "my first thoughts as I waited for the test results was that I was not ready to die because I had not yet found the love my heart had been seeking.” I was reminded of an exchange I had with a therapist many years ago who asked me if I ever contemplated suicide. “God, no,” I said. “I don’t even really feel like I’ve lived yet!”

The first section of All About Love begins with this quote from Diane Ackerman: 

As a society we are embarrassed by love. We treat it as if it were an obscenity. We reluctantly admit to it. Even saying the word makes us stumble and blush… Love is the most important thing in our lives, a passion for which we would fight or die, and yet we’re reluctant to linger over its names. Without a supple vocabulary, we can’t even talk or think about it directly.

Me, I’m fumbling for the words. But I have to try.