Review of All About Love

I wanted to admire All About Love, but I had to reject it. The book sets out to redefine love as an ethical practice grounded in care, responsibility, and commitment.

The central problem appears in bell hooks’ call to adopt “life-affirming thought patterns.” She argues that we transform ourselves by installing better ideas, replacing harmful narratives with healthier ones, and committing to affirming beliefs about love. Consciousness, in her account, can be corrected through intention, analysis, and disciplined reframing.

Love, however, is not the product of improved cognition, no matter how refined. It does not arise from moral clarity, ideological alignment, or the repetition of constructive phrases.

Love arises from sustained, unguarded attention to fear, attachment, jealousy, insecurity, and loneliness as they move through us. It requires staying emotionally present without escape, without substituting interpretation for observation.

Replacing one set of thoughts with another remains an activity of thought. Love is not a better pattern in the mind. It is a different quality of being.

Hooks writes from profound suffering at the hands of parents and partners who failed her. She distills those painful experiences into firm, unambiguous conclusions about love and domination. Readers with similar wounds may feel recognized and validated, even emboldened to name their own pain. That recognition has power. But private suffering does not automatically yield universal principles.

The conclusions offered have little practical force. The book does not make anyone more loving. It offers moral analysis, not transformation.

There is a horrifying story early in her book. At a “fun dinner party,” a man shared the value of the beatings he received as a child, and the other guests agreed. Bell tells him, in front of the group, that “maybe he wouldn’t be such a misogynist woman-hater had he not been beaten by a woman as a child.” Of course, she may be right, but nothing about her behavior in the story demonstrates love. On the contrary, she is blind to her need to be right in front of a dinner party that disagreed with her. She lets that need turn a vulnerable confession into a cruel moral indictment.

Ultimately, the book misses its aim. Had hooks examined how people attempt to love, where they succeed and fail, the work might have stood as memoir and critique. Instead, it presents itself as a guide to love, which it cannot be.

No book can teach love in this way. No words, mantras, theories, or prescribed actions can substitute for the difficult work of honestly facing one’s own fear, anger, jealousy, and insecurity as they arise, without blaming others or hiding behind ideas. As Krishnamurti wrote, truth is a pathless land.

How to Listen

 

For What Binds Us — Jane Hirshfield

There are names for what binds us:

strong forces, weak forces.

Look around, you can see them:

the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,

nails rusting into the places they join,

joints dovetailed on their own weight.

The way things stay so solidly

wherever they've been set down—

and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back

across a wound, with a great vehemence,

more strong

than the simple, untested surface before.

There's a name for it on horses,

when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh,

is proud of its wounds, wears them

as honors given out after battle,

small triumphs pinned to the chest—

And when two people have loved each other

see how it is like a

scar between their bodies,

stronger, darker, and proud;

how the black cord makes of them a single fabric

that nothing can tear or mend.

Passage from The Favourite Game — Leonard Cohen

Whenever they could they played their great game, the Soldier and the Whore. They played it in whatever room they could. He was on leave from the front and she was a whore of DeBullion Street.

Knock, knock, the door opened slowly.

They shook hands and he tickled her palm with his forefinger.

Thus they participated in that mysterious activity the accuracies of which the adults keep so coyly hidden with French words, with Yiddish words, with spelled-out words; that veiled ritual about which night-club comedians construct their humour; that unapproachable knowledge which grownups guard to guarantee their authority.

Their game forbade talking dirty or roughhouse. They had no knowledge of the sordid aspect of brothels, and who knows if there is one? They thought of them as some sort of pleasure palace, places denied them as arbitrarily as Montreal movie theatres.

Whores were ideal women just as soldiers were ideal men.

“Pay me now?”

“Here’s all my money, beautiful baby.”

Lightly

It’s dark because you are trying too hard.
Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly.
Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply.
Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig.
Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me.
When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic.
No rhetoric, no tremolos,
no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell.
And of course, no theology, no metaphysics.
Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light.
So throw away your baggage and go forward.
There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet,
trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair.
That’s why you must walk so lightly.
Lightly my darling,
on tiptoes and no luggage,
not even a sponge bag,
completely unencumbered.
— Aldous Huxley, Island

Journal entry