Weeping Over Life

The premodern world was obsessed with asking, "what is the point is of reading?" They had answers too.

• For example, the value for Christians and Muslims was holding up one book - the Bible or the Koran - as more important than anything else. This book was read repeatedly and with great attention.
• In the Ancient Greek world, one focused on just two books: Homer's Odyssey and his Iliad. These were all that was needed to impart the Greek code of honour and the best guides to action in military and civilian affairs.
• In the 18th century England, the ideal of reading was focused on Virgil's Aeneid - all a gentleman required to pass as cultivated. More reading was viewed as eccentric.

The modern world has adopted an Enlightenment mantra that states there should be no limit to how much we read because we read in order to know everything. We don't read to understand God or to follow civic virtue; we read to understand the whole of human existence.

This maximalist legacy of the Enlightenment idea of reading is present within the publishing industry, within the way books are presented to the public at school and in shops, and within our own guilty responses to the pressure to read more.

• This type of love is displayed when we come across the itinerant drunk - weather-beaten and ranting - and do not turn away but consider them as a version of ourselves, falling prey to the same passions and getting upset by similar losses and worthy of their own share of compassion.
• We also show love to the well-dressed person shouting grandly at an airport, filled with self-righteousness, and do not dismiss them as insane or entitled, but as vulnerable beneath the bluster.
• We show love when we see a small child throwing themselves on the floor, and do not focus on how piercing their screams are, but that their pain is in its general form ours too.
• It is love too when our partner is sometimes plainly irrational, unfair, and maddening, and we do not direct back a full dose of righteous anger but hold back and wonder how this formerly sane adult should have fallen apart in this manner. It is to hold open the idea that they might not have slept very well, are perhaps panicked by the future, and don't understand how to master it.

It is no particular accomplishment to love someone who is on their best behavior.

What is needed for our attention is the love of what is crooked, damaged, and self-disgusted. Here love is the effort required to imagine oneself into the life of another person who has not made it easy to admire or like them.

Instead of making relationships complicated and overambitious, we can just take care of these three essential but overlooked aspects:

1. Kindness: A person who is humane and kind, gentle and not too serious.
2. Shared Vulnerability: A person who is a good, empathetic listener, and makes us open comfortably about our anxieties, problems and worries.
3. Understanding: Someone who has a deep understanding of our traits, quirks, features, obsessions, and the way we see the world. Someone who is interesting enough for us to want to understand.

Paradoxically, by limiting our expectations about our relationship, we can concentrate on the three critical ingredients of kindness, understanding and vulnerability, and have a simple yet loving connection.

By simplifying and clarifying, we can release ourselves from our complicated conflicts and pursue a deep and profound bond.