Is Love Rational?
“Is love ever rational? If it were, half of literature and human history would not be there, would it? “
That’s what I wanted to tell folks who asked me a question about human history and some famous figures’ marriages. But of course, brilliant repartees are not my forte, and I thought of it on my evening walk instead. A wood duck was so amazed, it flew right past me letting me know what it thought.
Sigh.
I know people would choose to use time-turners for more important things in life, but I just think I would use them for things like this. Go back in time and give a cheeky retort, dazzle people with my blunt opinion, say what I mean etc etc. Always the little things.
This natural tendency of mine: ‘Least said, soonest mended!’ does not always seem to make me happy.
Love’s Strange Mark
Even as I teach history lessons in my classroom , I wonder how love’s arrows pierce and change the course of history.
- Did the conquerors want to impress someone?
- Did the soldiers fight especially fiercely because they wanted to go home to their loved ones?
- While you are reading about the conquistadors making their way through American Indian territories, you wonder how many stories of Pocahontas took place in those faraway times. How did they affect political alliances, did they make the conquering armies more humane?
Then, as is said in Jane Austen’s adaptation of Mansfield Park:
“There are as many forms of love as there are moments in time.”
How do you list out all the kinds of love that hold human-beings together?
The Different Kinds of Love
Watching the election updates unfold on television, I wondered the same thing. What were the motivations of all these people who chose to fight the good fight. Love for your community? Love for your country? And through it all trying to foster a sense of belonging and making history all at the same time.
We did a small presentation for the children in our classroom. We did not need to go into Republican and Democratic Party lines, we just needed to tell them about all the ways in which history was made that night. How many firsts? How many more people who get to hope, to feel they belong, or be heard and seen.
That is not even going to the kinds of love not involving human-beings. Love for nature, animals, pets.
We really are a complicated species being pulled and pushed, sustained and nourished, by a rich web of love.
To that, I am grateful.
