Love

In the ballroom amongst masked dancers, a playful encounter transforms Romeo and Juliet into lovers at first sight. From Romeo’s courteous overture Juliet nurtures a flirtatious sonnet. And so they duet, he as ardent pilgrim and she as reluctant saint, with one poetic voice1.

Aristotle defined love c. 350 BCE as wishing for anyone the things that we believe to be good, for that person’s sake but not for our own, and procuring goodness for them, as far as lies in our power2. Notions of romantic attachment began to spread through written literature only subsequently, and principally in regions and periods of high economic development3. Nowadays love has a central place in societies the world over.

The texture of familial love extends from the softest coddling through tender comfort, to gentle soothing and silky pride, into rough play, grating annoyance and sharp reprimand.

The temperature of chosen love rises from a cool ease of friendship through the balm of romance, igniting flames of passion, surrendering to molten rapture.

The tastes and smells of quotidian love bathe us in explosions of flavour from the provisions of our garden paradise.

Love sees beauty, is blind to judgement and disinclined to prudence in exercising its redemptive powers. A sad heart mourns a lost connection; the heart may break, even literally4 with emotional stress, and yet mend again with supportive care.

I love the wild mountains, the rough sea and the clouds scudding by, all that nourishes my soul. I love the Holocene, our settled era of stable seasons, lands of plenty and oceans teeming with fishes5.

An unloved heart feels lonely yearning. A spurned heart swells with anger; the exploited Holocene seethes with vengeful wrath in advancing climate extremes.

Love nowadays carries so many attributes that we can more easily agree on what it is not. Where there is no love there is fear and discord, cynicism, jealousy, antagonism, animosity, enmity and hatred, conflict, division, sorrow, self-pity … Love, then, happens in the freedom of its own dimension, suffusing our whole being, uncoupling passion from motive, transforming wilful attachments into attentive connections6.

In Act I Scene 5 of William Shakespeare’s (1623) Romeo and Juliet, teenagers Romeo and Juliet first meet as strangers.

If I profane with my unworthiest hand,
This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this,
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands, that pilgrims’ hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.
Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?
Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.
O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;
They pray (grant thou) lest faith turn to despair.
Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.
Then move not while my prayer’s effect I take:
He kisses her
Thus from my lips, by thine my sin is purg’d.
Then have my lips the sin that they have took.
Sin from my lips? O trespass sweetly urg’d!
Give me my sin again.
He kisses her
You kiss by th’ book.

They part ways smitten with each other, and soon each aghast to learn that the other belongs to a hated family.

The ancient Greek concept of love in Aristotle’s 350 BCE Rhetoric is consistent with the portrayal of marital love in Homer’s 700 BCE Odyssey. Odysseus (known as Ulysses in Latin versions) and Penelope demonstrate a proto-romantic sense of emotional devotion, encompassing shared duty, loyalty and desire. When Odysseus finally returns home after two decades away, Penelope must assure herself of his identity. She resorts to a secret known only to the two of them. In his presence, she instructs her servant to move the bed out of the bridal chamber and to prepare it for Odysseus. He reacts angrily, reminding her that he himself had built its frame, with a centre-post carved from the in-situ bowl of an olive tree. Only then does Penelope fling her arms around him, knowing that for both of them their bed symbolises the rootedness of their marriage.

The earliest known poetic writing is a romantic love poem of intimate and passionate ardour from Nippur, Mesopotamia dated c. 2030 BCE. Ancient Greek literature began to include references to romantic love during the Early Roman period beginning 27 BCE and continuing over the next 300 years. References to romantic love appear in Arabian literature of the Abbasid Caliphate from the 10ᵗʰ century, and in Japanese literature of the Helan period during the 11ᵗʰ century. By the 12ᵗʰ century, the occurrence of romantic love in literature had begun a steady upward trajectory across Eurasia and India (Baumard et al. 2022).

Emotional trauma can trigger severe heart dysfunction – ‘broken-heart syndrome’ – in an otherwise healthy person, which is reversible with suitable treatment (Wittstein et al. 2005).

Love blooms in constancy. Throughout the last 8,000 years of the Holocene era, average ambient temperatures have held remarkably constant, well within ±2°C of the early-20ᵗʰ century average and sheltered from the extreme climates of earlier eras and epochs. This enduring balance has favoured accelerating growth in human populations and economies, to the extent that our conversion of the planet’s resources into energy has now begun to destabilise global climate. Earth’s oceans are currently the warmest they have been in the last 100,000 years. Our exploitative activities have pushed nature into crisis, on a global scale since the mid-20ᵗʰ century. In the mid-19ᵗʰ century, Charles Darwin witnessed still-bountiful natural diversity all along his circumnavigation of the globe. Although many of the places he explored have now succumbed to the ensuing six-fold increase in world population, two of his most famous descriptions hold true to this today. In his 1839 The Voyage of the Beagle, his love of nature spills into delight at its abundance in beds of kelp seaweed that line the Strait of Magellan, the narrow stretch of sea separating mainland South America from Tierra del Fuego:
The number of living creatures of all Orders, whose existence intimately depends on kelp, is wonderful … Almost all the leaves, excepting those that float on the surface, are so thickly incrusted with corallines as to be of a white colour. We find exquisitely delicate structures, some inhabited by simple hydra-like polypi, others by more organised kinds, and beautiful compound Ascidiæ [tunicate sea squirts]. On the leaves, also, various patelliform shells [limpets], Trochi [top snails], uncovered molluscs [nudibranch sea slugs], and some bivalves are attached. Innumerable crustacea frequent every part of the plant. On shaking the great entangled roots, a pile of small fish, shells, cuttle-fish, crabs of all orders, sea-eggs, star-fish, beautiful Holuthuriæ [sea cucumbers], Planariæ [flatworms], and crawling nereidous animals [polychaete worms] of a multitude of forms, all fall out together. Often as I recurred to a branch of the kelp, I never failed to discover animals of new and curious structures. (June 1ˢᵗ 1834, page 256 of the 1909 edn.).

The final paragraph of Darwin’s seminal 1859 On the Origin of Species epitomises the countryside around Down House in the South of England, his home for the last 40 years of his life:
It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing in the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. (Chapter XIV Conclusion, pages 489-490 of the 1859 edn.).

Krishnamurti, J. (1969) Chapter 10. In: Freedom from the Known.