A reflection on love
As you may know, in my opinion the greatest novel ever written in English is James Joyce's Ulysses. People often lie and say "Oh, yes, I've read it." I'm not lying when I say I've read it three times. Every reading reveals new layers, new meanings.
The novel speaks to our fractured times, as it focuses on two outsiders to bigoted mainstream society: the atheist artist Stephen Dedalus, and the Irish Jew Leopold Bloom.
The book has so many passages of exquisite beauty that it would be hard to pin down a section which speaks to the heart of the matter. But if any passage does encapsulate the book, it's this one. Bloom is in a pub confronted by antisemites, after another fruitless day trying to sell advertising for a local newspaper. The discussion gets heated, until Bloom, "limp as a wet rag," collapses and gives his cri de couer
All political ideologies and statements, all grand utopian visions, tremble at this simple formulation.—But it's no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life.—What? says Alf.—Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred.
We are in the midst of a time when "insult and hatred" seem to abound. Where those seeking power do so by scorching the earth beneath their enemies' feet. We have a soi disant president who uses the worst rhetoric of twentieth century dictators, seeking to divide citizens one from another in an increasingly desperate effort to maintain power. We see fearful electorates across the Western world, afraid of change, seeking solace in a history in which things were "right". Alf, Bloom's antagonist in that chapter, is a narrow-minded, nationalistic bigot. He is exactly the type of person being catered to by our political moment.
But, as Bloom says, that's no life for men and women. It's the kind of life which has kept humanity in the dark for its entire history on this world. War, violence, rape, death: Those are the consequences of elevating the values which create the leaders which have been typical of humanity for thousands of years: the conquerors, the powers and principalities. It's led to nothing but cycles of destruction and rebuilding, like the Hindu cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, living and failing to learn the same lessons over and over again.
The cognoscenti will and have scoffed at Bloom's statement. But they do so because they're so invested in the cycle which Bloom, and by extension his creator Joyce, is trying to escape from. As a Jew, Bloom knows all too well what awaits those like him in this world of force and hatred. It's the weak who get it in the neck, as scapegoats must be found, as human offerings are made to appease Moloch. For them, love isn't some woolly-headed idea; it may be the only thing which keeps them alive. It's the idea which animated Martin Luther King, Jr. One can't meet hatred with hatred and expect to come away unscathed.
I don't know how, but somehow humanity has to extricate itself from this neverending, destructive cycle. The "realists" aver that conflict is what produces human greatness. That from war, new flowers bloom. But how many flowers are cut down? How many more would bloom if they weren't faced with the threat of violent death? The people who say that haven't spoken with survivors of war. War is abstracted, violence is a cleansing.
On this Valentine's Day, we could do worse than reflect on how we can replace hatred with love. And by this, I don't mean we have to be passive, or submit ourselves to oppression. But at some point we have to break the cycle. It's the difference between the peace imposed on Germany after the First World War, and the rebuilding spearheaded by the US after World War II. We have to rebuild the human community, or it shall surely perish.