"There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such
tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly, as love,"
the humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm wrote in his classic on
the art of loving. In some sense, no love ever fails, for no experience is ever
wasted -- even the most harrowing becomes compost for our growth, fodder for our
combinatorial creativity. But in another, it is indeed astonishing how often we
get love wrong -- how, over and over, it stokes our hopes and breaks our hearts
and hurls us onto the cold hard baseboards of our being, flattened by defeat and
despair, and how, over and over, we rise again and hurl ourselves back at the
dream of it, the delirium of it, the everlasting wonder of it.
How to go on doing it undefeated is what British philosopher Gillian Rose
examines in her part-memoir, part-reckoning Love's Work (public library),
written in the final years of her prolific and passionate life, and published
just before her untimely death of ovarian cancer.
Maria Popova shares more.
