December 9, 2009

• A ship needs an ocean

  It could have been the case for no serious sense of love to be possible for humans.  The world could have been bland, stale, and uninteresting.  But this is not the case, and yet it is so easy to miss it.

  Why is it that love is possible?  It is because people get hungry, and cold, and lonely.  Thus we can love people because they need food, shelter, and company.

  But even those things could end up being trivial if it wasn’t difficult to do those things.  And sometimes it isn’t difficult to provide food, shelter, and company for someone.  Maybe it was easy to get a job, and eventually we have an ample supply of food and shelter.  Furthermore, we could have lived on earth forever, in which case we would have as much company to give others as they wanted.  And it is not a serious sense of love to give someone what you have a lot of. 

  Our natural condition is one of narcissism.  We wake up in the morning thinking about our own needs, and it is sometimes quite surprising to us that the other humans are around, and that they get in our way.  We fight it a little bit, but really we are all hopelessly and helplessly in love with ourselves, at least judging from how much time and care we spend on trying to make ourselves happy.

  That is why it is such a serious thing to say “Love your neighbor as yourself.”  If we weren’t narcissists, this admonition would be completely unimpressive.  But as narcissists, it ought to strike us as profound and impossible.

  Furthermore, life is short.  We will die someday, and we all live our lives under this assumption.  Every moment of every day is spent under watch of the great eye of death, that one thought which seems the fulcrum of all the mind’s considerations.  Our bodies grow, they are expended, and then they fail. 

  It is all this that makes love possible.  To have a short life in which we by default care so much for ourselves provides the medium for us to choose to care about other people; or perhaps one person in particular.

  This is the context in which we can give our life to someone, and it actually means something.  For how much we naturally care about ourselves, and how short a life ours is bound to be, what a marvelous thing it is to say, ‘My life for your joy.’  

  And to just think of the infinite might that made the universe, and that he is the only one really capable of giving all, while getting nothing in return.  But he made the universe so that there could be a place to love. 

  • 12:43 am
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