Book Report: All About Love

65. bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (2000) (12/22/21)

When I learned last week that feminist cultural critic bell hooks had died, I felt it only right that I finally read this book, which I've had on my shelves for years. Finding it proved surprisingly easy, considering the spine had faded such that only "New Visions" was legible. Clearly, it, too, was ready to be read.

Comprising thirteen chapters titled in abstractions—clarity, justice, honesty, commitment, spirituality, values, greed, community, mutuality, romance, loss, healing, and destiny—the book explores the ways in which we both seek love and run from it. Occasionally, we even find it. In this effort, hooks invokes many, many other writers—psychologists, spiritualists, religious folk, philosophers, etc.—such as Jack Kornfeld, Thich Nhat Hanh, Alice Miller, Harriet Lerner, Sharon Salzberg, Thomas Merton, Marianne Williamson, and many more. (She was reportedly a voracious reader.) She also, and perhaps more rewardingly, speaks freely of her own life—her own experiences with difficult or fulfilling relationships, of being a child in a dysfunctional family, of seeking spiritual solace, of thinking about society and our place in it. 

hooks asserts from the start that love is not simply a feeling: it is an action, a way of being in the world, a process that involves active soulful connection, the will to nurture our own and others' spiritual growth. "To truly love," she writes, "we must learn to mix various ingredients—care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication." These must all be present and in balance. It is not easy to love; it requires work. 

Then too, we must be aware of tendencies that work against love, such as violence, materialism, manipulation by others, fear (of pain, of death, of discomfort). She points up capitalism and patriarchal structures and norms as especially damaging, promoting false dichotomies of what is possible or desirable in our search for wholeness.

Here is a paragraph from "Values: Living by a Love Ethic" that I found telling, given today's climate:

Cultures of domination rely on the cultivation of fear as a way to ensure obedience. In our society we make much of love and say little about fear. Yet we are all terribly afraid most of the time. As a culture we are obsessed with the notion of safety. Yet we do not question why we live in states of extreme anxiety and dread. Fear is the primary force upholding structures of domination. It promotes the desire for separation, the desire not to be known. When we are taught that safety lies always with sameness, then difference, of any kind, will appear as a threat. When we choose to love we choose to move against fear—against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect—to find ourselves in the other.

I found much of what she had to say worth pondering, but I also began to find the book a bit tedious by about half-way through—something about the preacherly voice, and the way she'd circle back and around to points already made. I am glad I read it—in a certain way it is affirming of the very possibility of more love in our lives. I'm also glad I can now mark it as complete.