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Prompt 3: Love [open]
Okay. Love, huh?
Love is probably one of the subjects - if not the subject - most written about in every form of literature, with perhaps the exception of the textbook, and even then there are usually some asides about the sexual politics of the time. And whether or not textbooks even qualify as "literature" is a debate in and of itself.
The Greeks had two names for love - agape was the love for all mankind, pure and selfless. Eros was the romantic love and sexual attraction between two people, a deep roiling desire for another human being. And it's eros romatic love that seems to fascinate humanityand non-humanity most of all.
There's a reason for that. The reason is that romantic love has a way of making everyone it touches both stupid and crazy. People can't eat, they can't sleep, they can't think about anything but the object of their desire. It's an all-consuming, passionate feeling. (Plus, there might be naked involved. And people just love naked. Really, platonic love can be passionate and all-consuming too, and it's been substantially written about as well, but there's no naked, or at least not nearly as much, so it just doesn't stack up, interestwise, to anything that might have sex in it.)
Some people define love as the opposite of hate. Those people are wrong. You can love someone and hate someone at the same time. You can hate someone so much you want to kill them while loving them so much you'd go anywhere and do anything just to be beside them. You tell yourself you hate them, despise them, only follow them to see them die... but on some level, deep, deep down, you know it's more than that. And it doesn't even feel complicated. It simply feels like... the way things should be. The way they are.
Love has been called a many-splendored thing. That's probably the most accurate description of it ever penned. I don't think even just two words for different kinds of love are enough. There are so many different ways and kinds and meanings of loving, it seems like every language on the planet out to have several hundred different ways of describing all the emotions and ways of caring we currently group together.
Then again, maybe not. Because if there's something similar enough about all this love that we can call it all "love," then maybe at its core, it's similar enough that that one word is all we really need.
Love is probably one of the subjects - if not the subject - most written about in every form of literature, with perhaps the exception of the textbook, and even then there are usually some asides about the sexual politics of the time. And whether or not textbooks even qualify as "literature" is a debate in and of itself.
The Greeks had two names for love - agape was the love for all mankind, pure and selfless. Eros was the romantic love and sexual attraction between two people, a deep roiling desire for another human being. And it's eros romatic love that seems to fascinate humanity
There's a reason for that. The reason is that romantic love has a way of making everyone it touches both stupid and crazy. People can't eat, they can't sleep, they can't think about anything but the object of their desire. It's an all-consuming, passionate feeling. (Plus, there might be naked involved. And people just love naked. Really, platonic love can be passionate and all-consuming too, and it's been substantially written about as well, but there's no naked, or at least not nearly as much, so it just doesn't stack up, interestwise, to anything that might have sex in it.)
Some people define love as the opposite of hate. Those people are wrong. You can love someone and hate someone at the same time. You can hate someone so much you want to kill them while loving them so much you'd go anywhere and do anything just to be beside them. You tell yourself you hate them, despise them, only follow them to see them die... but on some level, deep, deep down, you know it's more than that. And it doesn't even feel complicated. It simply feels like... the way things should be. The way they are.
Love has been called a many-splendored thing. That's probably the most accurate description of it ever penned. I don't think even just two words for different kinds of love are enough. There are so many different ways and kinds and meanings of loving, it seems like every language on the planet out to have several hundred different ways of describing all the emotions and ways of caring we currently group together.
Then again, maybe not. Because if there's something similar enough about all this love that we can call it all "love," then maybe at its core, it's similar enough that that one word is all we really need.