This Week in Books: I Want to Know What Love Is
A new book argues that love has been “stolen away from the poets.”
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Enormous developments in neuroscience over the past two decades have allowed researchers to peer into the human mind as never before. But it’s not always comfortable to learn about the mechanistic workings of our emotions. Certain feelings that were once endowed with as much mythology and fascination as the ancients granted the waxing and waning of the moon are now understood to be simple chemical reactions in the brain. Love, in particular, has inspired a lot of recent curiosity from scientists (more than half of the research papers about romantic love since 1953 are from the past 10 years) and defensiveness from those who don’t want this most human and effervescent of sentiments pinned like a butterfly to a board.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:
In an essay this week, Sophia Stewart looks at Ron Rosenbaum’s new book, In Defense of Love: An Argument. Rosenbaum is bothered by the way love has been “stolen away from the poets” and placed firmly in the domain of neuroscience, anthropology, psychology, and evolutionary biology. The emotion, he frets, has been brought down from the realm of the ineffable—a sensation with textures, a cause for awed reverence—and made just another thing to be classified.
He takes particular aim at Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist whose book Why We Love presented romance as a survival mechanism, a “drive,” just another evolutionary adaptation. This type of characterization impoverishes us, Rosenbaum responds, and “tells us precisely nothing about the infinitely variegated, subtly differentiated spectrum of human feelings.”
Stewart is sympathetic to Rosenbaum’s resistance but asks the perfectly reasonable question: Why can’t love be both understood and always, in the end, beyond understanding? Even the Catholic Church, she points out, eventually made its peace with heliocentrism. Stewart captures so well why we don’t need to set knowledge and feeling against each other and proposes a truce of sorts. “In actuality, love belongs equally to poets and scientists, because it belongs equally to the soul and the body,” she writes. “To pit one against the other is a losing wager: A truer understanding of love relies on both. Love is magic and hormones, spiritual union and synaptic firing, an emotional experience and a biological mechanism.”
Love Is Magic—And Also Hormones
What to Read
One Mighty and Irresistible Tide, by Jia Lynn Yang
Our broken immigration system is always a favorite topic of Republicans. But many voters are struggling to understand how Congress has failed for decades to fix it, particularly when the fate of Dreamers—people who were brought to the United States illegally as children—has been unresolved for more than 10 years, and there is nothing to prevent a future president from reviving the use of family separation as an enforcement tactic. One Mighty and Irresistible Tide provides some helpful explanations by tracing another fraught period in history. Yang vividly profiles key figures, such as the New York Representative Emanuel Celler, in the 40-year battle to repeal the ethnic quotas signed into law in 1924. Celler’s steady fight finally ended in 1965, during the civil-rights movement. It makes an implicit case that the moment some in Congress today seem to be waiting for—one where a universal consensus can be established, and reforming the system carries no political risk—will never come, and that challenging fearmongering rhetoric about immigrants remains as important as ever. — Caitlin Dickerson
From our list: What’s the one book that explains American politics today?
Out Next Week
📚 Terrace Story, by Hilary Leichter
📚 Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women’s Words, by Jenni Nuttall
📚 Learned by Heart, by Emma Donoghue
Your Weekend Read
I have been at parties with friends who are dancers, comedians, visual artists, and musicians, and I have never witnessed anyone say to them, “I’ve always wanted to do that.” Yet I can scarcely meet a stranger without hearing about how they have “always wanted to write a novel.” Their novel is unwritten, they seem to believe, not for lack of talent or honed skill, but simply for lack of time. But just as most people can’t dance on pointe, most people can’t write a novel. They forget that writing is art.
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