Robert Solomon - About Love

Cover

Page 1

REINVENTING ROMANCE FOR OUR TIMES

Robert C. Solomon

with a new preface

Page 2

First Madison Books edition 2001

This Madison Books paperback edition of About Love is an unabridged republication of the edition first published in Lanham, Maryland, in 1994, with the addition of a new preface by the author. It is reprinted by arrangement with Robert C. Solomon.

Copyright 1994 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
New preface copyright 2001 by Robert C. Solomon

The author is grateful for permission to reprint material from the following works:

Book of Love by Warren Davis, George Malone, and Charles Patrick. Copyright 1957, 1958 (renewed) by Arc Music Corp. and ABZ Music Corp. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Once by Alice Walker. Copyright 1968 by Alice Walker. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

The Complete Poetry of Carl Sandburg by Carl Sandburg. Copyright 1950 by Carl Sandburg. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

Published by Madison Books
4720 Boston Way
Lanham, Maryland 20706

12 Hids Copse Road
Cumnor Hill, Oxford OX2 9JJ, England
Distributed by National Book Network

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Solomon, Robert C.
About love : reinventing romance for our times / Robert C. Solomon
p. cm.
Originally published: New York : Simon and Schuster, 1988. With a new preface.
ISBN 1-56833-166-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Love. I. Title.

BD436 . S6 2001
128.46dc21 00-052699

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.481992.
Manufactured in the United States of America.

Page 3

F O R K A T H L E E N ,
my patient teacher

Page 4

This page intentionally left blank.

Page 5

Now, I think love is becoming an abstraction.... The soul has become a department of sex, and sex has become a department of politics.

If our society is going to recover, we must recover this idea of love. But we cant go back to the early platonic and Christian ideals of love, because biology and modern science have changed things. Poets, artists, musicians, men of imagination have to find a new image of love, and that is the most important thing. If we dont find this, life is going to be a desert. We must reinvent love.

O C T A V I O P A Z , Newsweek interview,
November 19, 1979

Page 6

This page intentionally left blank.

Page 7

What follows is an essay, a personal attempt, not a scholarly study or a scientific investigation. It represents a struggle, not laboratory research or sociological theory or moral lobbying. I have tried, no doubt without complete success, to avoid glibness, cleverness, cuteness, ostentatious scholarship, extensive philosophical argument, and other such distractions, though I confess that I feel a bit naked without those familiar supports. My conclusions, too, are personal and practical, not scholarly or scientific, though I do develop a theory of love along the way. My thesis is, in a nutshell, that love is in fact even more profound and basic to our being than most of our talk about it would suggest, that love is best when cultivated from friendship rather than propelled with great force from some initial explosion of passion, and that love actually gets better with time, rather than waning as we so often fear. In finishing this book, I am struck most of all by the enormous expenditure of intelligence, experience, emotion, and bad judgment that it has taken me to reach these conclusions.

Many friends and authors have contributed to the thoughts in this book, but deserving of special mention are Angela Cox, Betty Sue Flowers, Carolyn Ristau, Paul Woodruff, Susan Tyson, Shari Starrett, Irving Singer, Jane Isay, Phyllis Green, my editor at Simon and Schuster, Laurie Lister, and her assistant, Scott Corngold, and especially all the students in my 1985 Humanities seminar, and to the Monotones, wherever they are.

Page 8

This page intentionally left blank.

Page 9

Page 10