WHAT IS LOVE

WHAT IS LOVE: THE GREAT DEBATE OF THE HEART

AN ESSAY
BY
T.L. HUTTON
2021

Love – such an omnipotent noun.

Like a double-edged sword love stands as the epitome of duality. The one side – wielded by the Honorable, the Dutiful, the Chivalric, and the Philanthropic – retains the sole authority to mend those deepest, most agonizing of wounds with a few kind words or a mere caring gesture. The other side – that of the Unscrupulous, the Remiss, the Misogynistic – carelessly severs entire appendages with chaotic glee.

It merely depends upon who might be wielding that proverbial sword…and how it is that they elect to wield it.

However, that does not define what love is. If anything, such simply conveys some sense of that which love is capable of.

So - for the sake of that Great Debate of the Heart – what then is love?

The Ancient Greeks believed that love culminated within a diversity of individual manifestations for every aspect of life: Eros, or the erotic love between a man and woman, husband and wife; Philia, that brotherly love of family and close friends; Agape, the unconditional divine love from above.

With his uncanny insight and understanding of the Human Condition, Shakespeare mused that “Love is madness, a mental disease,” while Germany’s Voltaire romanticized that “Love does not dominate, but cultivates.”

The Hopeless Romantic would poise the argument that love was an elated and lofty nirvana and give credit to that pudgy little cherub, Cupid, for piercing unsuspecting hearts with his quivers.

Within the musty pages of Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, Francesca de la Rimini, Soul of the Woeful Lovers, lamented from atop the pitch steppes of Purgatorio that love was “no greater misery than when in sadness remembering the happy times,” while in Paradise Lost Milton reflected that “Love, to itself does not care, but to another gives its ease, and builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair.”

Perhaps love is all of these things. Maybe it is none of them. Perhaps it is some unfathomed facet of both the Human and Inhuman Condition that is far beyond our simple human understanding.

Whatever it is that love might truly be, there is no definitive right or wrong answer to this age-old query.

For some, it might be a passage from a favorite book that inspired them to reach new heights. For others, it might be that lightning bolt CRACK! as hickory and leather collide on opening day at Wrigley Field. For some, it might be a scent that stirs the nostalgia of a favorite childhood memory. For others, it might be those coldest, darkest of moments just before the dawn when all the colors of the earth suddenly come alive, seem to glow like the freshly dyed threads of some magnificent Persian rug in a tapestry that only the Gods, and perhaps a handful of painters, have ever managed to weave.

Ever since mankind first clambered out of the primordial ooze, individual notions, beliefs, and concepts of what love might be, have proven the subject of debate. And until that day when civilization crumbles and falls back into that churning mire of cosmic nascence, it shall continue to be the topic of deliberation.

Yet, despite that Great Debate of the Heart, there remains a hard-wired universal ideology within the most primal reaches of the Human Condition that cannot be refuted.

Whatever it might be, love is that one thing that we always hold onto whether we see it, feel it, or not. That one thing that gives up hope. That motivates us. It is that intangible thing that leads us to trust in ourselves, to believe in ourselves, and pushes us to follow our hearts. It is that thing which helps us to overcome, improve, and endure.

Love…love is that which makes us Human.

- T.L. Hutton
October 6, 2021
Phoenix, AZ