When I was a child, it was clear to me that life was not worth living if we did not know love. I wish I could testify that I came to this awareness because of the love I felt in my life.
The opening lines of the book are contained within the Preface and very much act as an introduction to the overall thematic tapestry of this unusual entry in the body of work as a whole of bell hooks. While it is a political and social discourse which engages the author’s typical literary engagement, it is at the same very much a personal memoir highly dependent upon individual experience. More so usual in the explorations of critical thought which define the previously published writing of hooks, analysis of the more universalized social conditions are informed by distinctly individualized biographical experience. The reader is extended an opportunity to get to know one of the most fascinating social critics of the late 20th century more personally in a way that should not be ignored.
Capitalism and patriarchy together, as structures of domination, have worked overtime to undermine and destroy this larger unit of extended kin. Replacing the family community with a more privatized small autocratic unit helped increase alienation and made abuses of power more possible. It gave absolute rule to the father, and secondary rule over children to the mother.
One of the things which makes bell hooks such a fascinating social critic is her lifelong determination to illuminate the connection made between economic circumstances and the business of doing about one’s personal life. The viewpoint that hooks has always defiantly made is that there simply is no division between political ideology and personal politics. This is a theoretical fact, if you will, that seems so obvious as to be unworthy of debate. If the population of a state adapts the circumscribed rules of a political ideology, then actual trickle-down theory is inevitable. In other words, the ideology of the state is adopted as the ideology of the individuals. It may not seem obvious as it becomes simply a matter of daily existence, but most of the interaction within the family dynamic of the population of the U.S. is but simply a mirroring of social dynamic at large.
Our culture may make much of love as compelling fantasy or myth, but it does not make much of the art of loving. Our disappointment about love is directed at romantic love. We fail at romantic love when we have not learned the art of loving. It’s as simple as that.
One of the fundamental premises of the book is society is simultaneously obsessed with the idea of love while growing increasingly dismissive of it. This dismissal ranges from simply fearing love to cynical rejection of its importance in society to the very extremity of arguing that love does not really even exist. Part and parcel of this premise is that it is almost impossible to define what we mean when we say the word. Love can range from the worship of a god to the object of lust. Even within this enormous spectrum, however, is the idea—whether embraced or rejected—that is idealized romantic love that is most often imagined when the subject is discussed. And, of course, since romantic love that turns out to be less than ideal is the norm, it is inevitable that love comes to be viewed through negative lenses. And if we come to see the universalized idea of love in negative ways, it is also inevitable that this negativity will spread to perspectives toward the many other concepts of what love actually means.
