Learning how to love

I caused some confusion (and a little consternation) at my brother’s wedding when I announced, in a speech before family and friends, that I didn’t know what love is, but I had always been interested in learning. It was supposed to be a Socratic gesture, but it backfired. I had forgotten, of course, that weddings are places where the idea of love is not called into question. Fortunately, no one made sense of what I was talking about and I was duly ignored.

In my defense, I was simply recounting one of my favorite of Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideas about learning how to love. This comes from The Joyful Wisdom (Die Frohliche Wissenschaft) of 1882. I hope you come to love it as much as I do.

‘One must learn how to love. — This is what happens to us in music: First one has to learn to hear a figure and melody at all, to detect and distinguish it, to isolate it and delimit it as a separate life. Then it requires some exertion and good will to tolerate it in spite of its strangeness, to be patient with its appearances and expression, and kindhearted about its oddity. Finally, there comes a moment when we are used to it, when we sense that we should miss it if it were missing; and now it continues to compel and enchant us relentlessly until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers who desire nothing better from the world than it and only it.

But that is what happens to us not only in music. That is how we have learned to love all things that we now love. In the end we are always rewarded for our good will, our patience, fairmindedness, and gentleness with what is strange; gradually, it sheds its veil and turns out to be a new and indescribable beauty. That is its thanks for our hospitality. Even those who love themselves will have learned it in this way; for there is no other way. Love, too, has to be learned’.

Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom (also trans. The Gay Science), aphorism 334.

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