Love is a giver and a plunderer, the way in which it each anneals the self and alters it, the way in which it moors our wholeness and maps our incompleteness. At its coronary heart is the ecstatic, disorienting recognition that our world is unfinished, that by coming into the world of the opposite we broaden and enlarge our personal, that ultimately there isn’t any world — solely a flowing trade of vitality, via which we turn into extra fully ourselves.
On this transformation, we partake of the miraculous.
The pioneering psychologist and thinker William James (January 11, 1842–August 26, 1910) explores this miraculous, world-remaking side of affection in a passage from The Sorts of Spiritual Expertise: A Research in Human Nature (public library | free e book) — the 1902 masterwork primarily based on his Gifford Lectures about science, spirituality, and the human seek for that means, which additionally gave us James on the 4 options of transcendent experiences.
Constructing on his revolutionary 1884 idea of emotion, James observes that feeling is what offers valence and that means to expertise — with out it, “nobody portion of the universe would then have significance past one other; and the entire assortment of its issues and sequence of its occasions could be with out significance, character, expression, or perspective.” Seeing love as “essentially the most acquainted and excessive instance of this truth,” he considers its energy and its choicelessness:
If it comes, it comes; if it doesn’t come, no technique of reasoning can pressure it. But it transforms the worth of the creature cherished as totally because the dawn transforms Mont Blanc from a corpse-like grey to a rosy enchantment; and it units the entire world to a brand new tune for the lover and offers a brand new problem to his life.
Exactly as a result of it lives past the attain of purpose, love is rarely attained by willful effort, can’t be bargained for or earned — it’s a present and a miracle that comes unbidden as birdsong, whole as a galaxy.
Reflecting on these deepest of human feelings, James writes:
If they’re there, life modifications. And whether or not they shall be there or not relies upon nearly all the time upon non-logical, typically on natural circumstances. And because the excited curiosity which these passions put into the world is our present to the world, simply so are the passions themselves presents — presents to us, from sources typically low and typically excessive; however nearly all the time nonlogical and past our management.
The constraints of logic are why we so profoundly fail to think about what lies on the opposite facet of affection’s transformation. The self-limitation of management is the cage of howling loneliness that retains us from the liberty essential for love — for love is “a knot manufactured from two intertwined freedoms,” in Octavio Paz’s unforgettable definition. That mysterious side of affection — unreachable by logic and purpose, impervious to will and management — is why our selection in love is largely an phantasm, why our slender margin of selection incorporates solely the braveness and endurance with which we face its trembling uncertainty and select to love anyway.
Complement with Kahlil Gibran on the braveness to climate the uncertainties of affection and Christian Wiman on love and the sacred, then revisit William James on the psychology of consideration (as a result of, lest we overlook, love is “the standard of consideration we pay to issues.”)
