Hello, my darling child,
I woke up this morning when Sam put a cup of tea on my bedside table.
When I could finally pry myself away from dry-mouthed sleepiness and have a sip while it was still hot, I told him I was excited because today was the first birthday of Love Letter. He said, oh, and it’s Valentine's Day. I told him that’s why I had chosen to write the first letter on the 14th of February. He’d forgotten.
I, meanwhile, had forgotten that the most important thing about 14 February in the rest of the world’s view is not that it signifies the birth of this idea that has brought me so much joy and growth (the Love Letter, that is) in the past year, but that it is the day on which everyone thinks about kitschy lovey-dovey stuff.
I said to Sam: ‘So, will you be my Valentine?’ and he said, ‘Only if you’ll be mine.’ Which was us not being cheesy, it was us being silly, because neither of us is into dutiful demonstrations of devotion or into the exploitation of emotion and expectation through red-heart-and-roses capitalism.
Oddly though, Love Letter and Valentine’s Day aside, I spent the past week thinking quite a lot about love in all its Greek manifestations. Do you know them? Eros, which is sexual love, Storge, which is familial love, Philia, which is the love we have for friends and equals, and then Agape, which is the meant to be the highest form of love.
Agape interests me because it is the highest and, for me, the hardest of the four. It demands that you have no conditions to the love you give. Actually all types of love demand that.
To have agape, you cannot want someone to look like you do, think like you do, or share the values you have in order to love them. You simply have to accept all people as you find them – even if they let their dogs crap in public and don’t bother to pick it up – and love them anyway. It means you have to love those who seem unloveable to you. You have to serve all people, and the greater good without question, or resentment, or expectation of thanks or recognition.
The concept of agape underpins the single Bible verse I believe in wholeheartedly:
4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
The King James Version of the English Bible uses the word ‘charity’ instead of ‘love’ in this verse. But it’s not ‘charity’ the way we understand it now. The archaic meaning of ‘charity’ is ‘kindness and tolerance’ and ‘a love of humankind’.
Agape is hard. Really hard.
The place where I struggle most with agape is in trying to unconditionally love people who show little tolerance for obvious otherness. In therapy once, my therapist joked that I seem to be able to tolerate anything but intolerance.
The irony.
I have to work really hard to extend acceptance to people who deny others their humanity. I struggle to have patience with people who will do no self-reflection, only ever lash out at the world, take no responsibility for their own behaviour or unhappiness, and who can only view the world through their own narrow lenses.
Do you know what I mean? Agape is bloody hard work.
In this wonderful piece on the meaning of love in Buddhism, Scott Snibbe writes that unbiased love ‘can be conjured systematically’ through reflection.
In agape, and in Buddhist idea of loving-kindness, you do not need other people to give you what your ego wants (admiration, gratitude, attention, respect, or even the time of day) in order to be happy or for you to love them. I need to learn to practise agape even though those I struggle to tolerate will not give me the world I want: one in which people are just not horrible towards or about one another.
A love-and-let-live world, in other words.
Love’s a huge, sprawling monster of a topic and I don’t want to try and get all its tentacles into the net of this letter today. But on a slightly different love topic, I do want to tell you – although you might already know, because I’ve said it often – what my favourite quote on direct, one-to-one love it. It is from the poet Adrienne Rich:
An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love” — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, of refining the truths they can tell each other.
It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.
It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.
It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
It’s a good one, hey? Love demands a lot of us: it demands that we give up self-delusion. Which might be a harder ask than loving everyone, even the people we don’t like.
After tea this morning, Sam and I went for a walk on the beach. And we spoke about some things that were hard. Without anger or recrimination.
I love him in all four Greek ways. Because he always chooses to go ‘that hard way’ with me.
My list of favourite eros-love things
Favourite eros love fiction ever: The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Favourite non-fiction on eros love (and the ONLY thing that helped me begin to get over a shattered heart with practical advice): Why We Love by Helen Fisher
Favourite eros love song: In Your Eyes by Peter Gabriel
Favourite eros poems between me and Sam: Even So
My two other favourite love quotes are both in German…
…and are translated loosely here by moi:
Schön ist eigentlich alles, was man mit Liebe betrachtet. Je mehr jemand die Welt liebt, desto schöner wird er sie finden.
‘Beautiful is actually everything one gazes upon with love. The more you love the world, the more beautiful you’ll find it.’
(By Christian Morgenstern from Stufen)
And:
Wenn durch einen Menschen ein wenig mehr Liebe und Güte, ein wenig mehr Licht und Wahrheit in der Welt war, dann hat sein Leben einen Sinn gehabt.
When, through a person’s existence, there has been a little more love and goodness, a little more light and truth in the world, their life has had meaning.
(By Adolf Delp, a Jesuit priest who stood up against Nazism and was killed for it.)
Things I loved this past month
Going to the Imax with your Ouma to see Avatar II – almost three hours of complete and total absorption into a story uninterrupted by anyone’s phones or wandering attention. Also: THE MOVIES! Streaming is great an’ all, but going to the movies will remain forever a favourite outing. Oupa and Ouma introduced me to stories from my first conscious moments, and taught me to love being swept up in them, and I love going to the cinema with her.
Visiting the Javett Art Centre at the University of Pretoria (and especially visiting it with Sandra, because going to art galleries with other people can be really tricky, but not when it’s with your book-and-art bestie from high school). Most surprising was how much I enjoyed the gold exhibition, which tells the story of gold and where you can view the most astonishing African ornaments, jewellery and photographs of gold, as well as some of the gold artefacts retrieved at Mapungubwe.
This podcast in which the writer Etgar Keret talks about and reads some stories about his mother. It is warm and funny and sweet and lovely. His mother was formidable.
January Self Reset, which founder subscribers of Love Letters took part in and which was such an enormous success and made me so happy, that I’m going to do it again in July. The point was to reconnect to our innate creativity, to catch up with ourselves, and think about what we wanted more of and what we wanted to let go of. Here’s what one of the founder members wrote to me:
I'm doing the reset every day and it is helping me so much. Our year started off with a lot of bad stuff and doing the exercises every day is definitely keeping from spiralling too much.
It feels like my soul is being loosened up after being wound up too tightly.
Housekeeping
Welcome to all the new subscribers and thank you to those who upgraded their subscriptions.
If you’ve been wanting to upgrade to paid but are worried about your finances, please remember that you can share a subscription with others.
Dateline, my first travel report for 2023, was sent out last week. Read it here if you missed it. Check your ‘other’ or ‘promotions’ inboxes if you didn’t see it.
If life’s been getting you down, you might want to read my last Extra Large Love Letter here for some antidotes to despair.
Happy Anniversary, Love Letter readers. I’ve phillial-y and agape-ly loved all of you for your humour, interest, warmth and loving kindness.
Let’s go out there and agape the crap out of the world!
Love,
Kowski