All About Love

Author: bell hooks

“This book tells us how to return to love” in a way that is free from patriarchal constraints and the matrix of oppression and ignorance created by modern society. It expands love’s definition beyond the notion of romance and emotional attachment — it empowers by providing the language needed to differentiate between love and other, often conditioned, feelings.

Though the ideas presented are powerful, their impact is (in my opinion) diminished through the assertive tone and excessive repetition. The writing leaves no room for reflection or reader interpretation. Instead, hooks seems to be trying to push her ideas onto the reader rather than allowing the reader to slowly digest her worldview as food for thought. Even so, I’d still strongly recommend this book to anyone who struggles with, or even just wants to improve, their relationships with others, as it helped me change my mindset to be more compassionate and understanding towards someone I could not see eye to eye with before. Approaching the book with an open mind and powering through the sometimes tiresome tone is worth it.

notes

1. Defining love is important because it gives us a starting point
   1. Loss is easier to talk about than love
      1. We don’t know what love is
      2. Love in media is bound by the illusion of a gender binary
      3. Modern society is desensitized to sex and has an obsession with it, yet love is not taught
   2. Love is a mixture of care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, trust, and communication
   3. Love has become dominated by consumerist culture
2. Love is an action rather than a feeling; it is a choice and a practice
   1. Nurturing our own and another’s spiritual growth
   2. Care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, trust, honest and open communication
   3. Cathexis is the feeling
   4. The first responsibility of love is to listen
   5. Love is rooted in solitude
3. There can be no love without justice
4. Trust is the foundation of relationships
   1. People accept and normalize lying because patriarchal femininity encourages weakness and patriarchal masculinity encourages estrangement from selfhood — both require a masking of the truth
5. Love yourself before you love others
6. All awakening to love is spiritual awakening (^ref-22259, ^ref-44824, ^ref-43850)
7. There can be no love with power and domination (^ref-52812, ^ref-13601, ^ref-51646)
   1. The privilege of power is at the heart of patriarchal thinking
   2. Rilke similarly implies that feminism, with women taking the first step, will help create a “more human form of love” (^83bb70)
8. In a consumerist society, the passion to connect is replaced by the passion to possess (^ref-64824)
   1. Society is conditioned to seek instant gratification, but love requires time and commitment
   2. Living simply creates space for love
9. Community fills us with love (^ref-30635, ^ref-43288)
10. Love makes generosity easy
    1. Forgiveness is an act of generosity
       1. It contributes to optimism instead of cynicism (人性本善 / 人性本惡)
11. Romance is different from love
    1. People see what they wish to see
    2. There is no love exclusively for romantic relationships (^ref-60313, ^ref-2046, ^ref-60075)
    3. True love exists, but it can be scary because it exposes the innermost self, maskless (^ref-41470, ^ref-13453)
12. Fear of death prevails over love of life in modern society, creating a certain madness and paranoia (^ref-46214, ^ref-30701, ^ref-3362) 4. Cultures of domination court death
13. Grief sustains love in death (^ref-14418, ^ref-55047)
    1. Love is both the cause and result of fate (^ref-57629)
    2. Living with love allows one to live without regrets and thus embrace death as a part of life
14. Healing is an act of communion (^ref-57967)
    1. With others
       1. Healthy interdepedency ^ref-53836
    2. With God (^ref-3283)
15. Sin as spiritual forgetfulness
16. Compassion is empathy without judgement
17. Fear stands in the way of love (^ref-43430, *^ref-51646)
    1. Love gives strength (^ref-37539)
18. There is a collective wish to return to love as The Fool (^ref-9135)
    1. Loving leads to paradise (^ref-50255)
    2. The space of lack is also a space of possibility (^ref-30496)
19. Healing happens when wounds are embraced
20. Angels as spiritual guides, daemons (Demian - The Story of Emil Sinclair’s Youth)

thoughts and reactions

Self-love is similar to the Dao principle of

Transclude of The-Dao-De-Jing#ref-44150

releasing ourselves from the constructs created by the environment.

I don’t like bell hook’s writing style in this essay collection because it’s very repetitive — yes, we get it. Emphasis and repetition helps make things memorable, but there’s a fine line between being helpful and being annoying. She writes like the audience is stupid.

Mainstream western media focuses on systems of oppression as the basis, whereas alternative media emphasizes love, peace, and subverting these norms (e.g. Trigun, ORV, Hades, etc.). There is hope yet.

Rather than teaching us how to love, it educates about how society impacts perceptions of love. How can we subtly integrate a love ethic into society?

I think this book is helpful in that it defines love so one can easily identify unloving situations instead of falling victim to them. I know how to love, but sometimes I can be blind to lovelessness.

How can we condition society to be dare to face the unknown? How can we prioritize justice over greed?

quotes

Introduction: Grace: Touched by Love

in the song of solomon there is this passage that reads: “i found him whom my soul loves. i held him and would not let him go.” to holding on, to knowing again that moment of rapture, of recognition where we can face one another as we really are, stripped of artifice and pretense, naked and not ashamed.

Yet young listeners remain reluctant to embrace the idea of love as a transformative force.

• Reminds me of the core theme of Trigun
  • Love in media is important, not just sexual love, not just relationships
    • Love of all kinds that doesn’t need a label
      • Transcendant
      • Communicated through feelings
        • It can’t be dissected
          • Whoever looks at the matter seriously finds that, as for death, which is difficult, no explanation, no solution, has yet been discovered for love, which is difficult too: there are no directions, no path. Letters to a Young Poet

Famous for work that calls attention to the “inner child”, Bradshaw believes that ending patriarchy is one step in the direction of love.

• Also reminds me of Letters to a Young Poet
  • One day (there are already reliable signs which speak for it and which begin to spread their light, especially in the northern countries), one day there will be girls and women whose name will no longer just signify the opposite of the male but something in their own right, something which does not make one think of any supplement or limit but only of life and existence: the female human being.
• Men’s perceptions of love rooted in fantasy

Perhaps this is because all that enlightened woman may have to say about love will stand as a direct threat and challenge to the visions men have offered us.

One: Clarity: Give Love Words

And they know that what we think love means is not always what they believe it means. Our confusion about what we mean when we use the word “love” is the source of our difficulty in loving.

• Labels create the bondage of dogmas that mutes the song of existence
  • “for their nature tells them that questions of love, even less than all other important matters, cannot be solved publicly and by following this or that consensus; that they are questions that touch the quick of what it is to be human and which in every case require a new, particular and purely private response” Letters to a Young Poet
• Definition of love is sloppy
  • I think Rilke did well in comparing it to death and suggesting that it requires a journey down the paths of solitude, introspection
    • But of course that’s speaking from my own experiences, I was lucky to grow up in a loving family and not have to suffer the abuse and trauma that many others have in their pasts
      • Then, a purpose for my life would be to help those around me find love, too

M. Scott Peck’s classic self-help book The Road Less Travelled, first published in 1978. Echoing the work of Erich Fromm, he defines love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” Explaining further, he continues: “Love is as love does. Love is an act of will — namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.”

To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients — care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication.

When we feel deeply drawn to someone, we cathect with them; that is, we invest feelings or emotion in them. That process of investment wherein a loved one becomes important to us is called “cathexis.” … Since their feeling is that of cathexis, they insist that what they feel is love.