What is love?

I’ve been reading bell hooks’ book All About Love: New Visions and I don’t know how I feel about it yet.  I’ve read her books Killing Rage and Feminism is for Everybody, but this one is different.  As described on Amazon,

Readers of bell hooks’s fiery and eloquent attacks on racism and sexism might be surprised to see her take on the elusive subject of love, but in her own unique way, hooks beautifully weaves her childhood search for that emotion with society’s misuse (and dire need) of it. All About Love takes apart the sentimental and often fleeting aspects of romance, stuck in the muddled urges of sex, and details the problems that arise from the confusion between the two. What hooks does best is reveal that the true force of love lies in its spiritual, redemptive power, which can impact positively on humankind: “When angels speak of love they tell us it is only by loving that we enter an earthly paradise,” she writes. “They tell us paradise is our home and love our true destiny.” –Eugene Holley Jr.

Perhaps I fall into the trap set by our own society about the notion of love that promotes a lack of love to become normalized, but at times I have felt the book to be too easily optimistic and “self-help”-like.  But I have to catch myself, because a lot of what hooks says, I believe in– just in a round about and fairly more cynical, yet ultimately hopeful way.  It’s been a good read so far, though.  I have chapters I like more than others so I’ve gone back and forth in liking the book in its entirety, but I have a couple chapters left, so maybe when I finish I’ll have something more concrete to say about the book.  For now though, I definitely suggest it to others to pick up.  hooks is a powerful writer and if you haven’t read anything by her yet, get to it!

To close, I’ll leave you with this poem that I think quite nicely deals with the many nuances of love and its transformative force.