Love

Love is the broadest of the emotions Vela reads and the one most often softened into sentiment. The reading runs through registers that resist the softening.

bell hooks's *All About Love* makes the case that love is best understood as a practice rather than a feeling — what one chooses to do for the beloved, repeatedly, over time. Marilynne Robinson's *Gilead* sequence reads love across generations and across the small daily decisions that constitute it. Wendell Berry's Port William stories read love as fidelity to a place and to the people who live in it. Carson McCullers wrote love as the climate of difficult intimacies. The queer literature — Maggie Nelson's *The Argonauts*, Garth Greenwell — has had to re-imagine love against received scripts.

The contemplative tradition holds love as a serious subject across centuries. The thirteenth chapter of *1 Corinthians* — *love is patient, love is kind* — names love as what it does. Augustine of Hippo writes about *amor* across the *Confessions* as the orienting motion of the soul. The four Greek words — *agape* (selfless care), *eros* (desiring love), *philia* (the love of friends), *storge* (the love of family) — let the same English word hold registers that the contemplative writers have kept separate.

Love is not the same as tenderness, desire, admiration, or gratitude. Tenderness is love's somatic posture when the beloved is fragile. Desire is the lean; love is what survives the lean's exhaustion. Admiration is approach toward something held above; love does not require that altitude. Gratitude is the recognition of a gift; love can be present even when the gift goes unrecognized.

A slower companion essay on love is forthcoming.