Issue #12: Can We Really Learn to Love?

Fromm, Byrne, Hughes and a princess locked up in a lighthouse

Jan 19, 2025

There's a lot below the line this week so I'll keep the introduction mercifully brief. There's music, death, a story about a princess trying to avoid a snakebite and much else besides. I start by teaching you how to love. Suffice to say that my wife would find this a source of great amusement.

In the issue:

Erich Fromm on cultivating a readiness for love #philosophy
David Byrne finds a space for every music and every music finds its right space #music
Ted Hughes on connecting to the child within #literature
Solving a mystery written into the walls of medieval Italian architecture #folklore #anthropology
To the lighthouses #architecture
As always, something to think about this week

Can We Really Learn to Love? Erich Fromm on the Art of Loving #philosophy

“O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!”

When Romeo falls for Juliet, he falls hard and he falls fast. To him, Juliet is not merely beautiful, she is otherworldly, a presence so luminous she seems to cast a glow brighter than the stars. His love is pure, euphoric, consuming. It requires no compromise, no pragmatism, nothing that could be mistaken as work. It simply falls upon him, seizing him in its grip on the first moment of sighting.

And isn't that just precisely the problem?

For psychoanalyst and social philosopher Erich Fromm, writing in The Art of Loving in 1956, this all-too-common conceptualisation of love as something that is found, recognised instantly and subsequently acquired is the wrong way of thinking about it entirely.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I want to start by addressing some of the faults in this text, because its a frustrating read to say the least. You've got hints at the damage the feminist movement has done to the male-female 'opposition' that is central to erotic love, you've got the accompanying implication that homosexuals are therefore somehow less capable of love, there's some stuff about a mother's natural maternal instinct that doesn't sit quite right and then, on top of it all, you've got that title. The Art of Loving. How am I supposed to read this on public transport?

But despite the ample evidence of its 1950s-ness, I do think there's something of value here, so let it be my role to try and pick out the gold so you don't have to sift through the muck.

What Fromm is looking to do is nothing short of solving the 'fundamental problem of human existence,' which he locates in our separateness. We're back again to that uniquely human condition, life that is aware of itself, aware of its individuality, aware of being cut off and vulnerable and alone and helpless.

'This awareness of himself as a separate entity, the awareness of his own short life span, of the fact that without his will he is born and against his will he dies, that he will die before those whom he loves, or they before him, the awareness of his aloneness and separateness, of his helplessness before the forces of nature and of society, all this makes his separate, disunited existence an unbearable prison. He would become insane could he not liberate himself from this prison and reach out, unite himself in some form or other with men, with the world outside.'

When put that way, its no wonder we seek romantic love so obsessively. And Fromm would argue this is an obsession; we seek out films about romantic love, we read novels about it, practically all the great pop songs are about love in some way or another. There's a reason Romeo is one of literature's best known protagonists. We all, on some level, want what he found, want to be struck by the same lightning bolt, to find the person with whom we will eternally rest, if only to shake off that terrifying feeling of separateness.

But if we all want love so desperately, how can we be so bad at finding and maintaining it (what Fromm would have made of modern divorce statistics is anyone's guess)? Well, in a sense, Fromm would find the answer to that question buried within my formulation of it. If love is something that can simply be 'found,' then it must be some sort of external entity, lurking somewhere around the water cooler or maybe on the underground, just waiting to wallop us over the head and leave us seeing stars.

But if we're simply searching for love as we would a set of keys (or worse - passively waiting for it to find us) there's nothing necessitating any process of understanding. As Fromm says, 'hardly anyone thinks that there is anything that needs to be learned about love' (my emphasis). You don't have to grapple with the essential nature of a set of keys in order to remember that you were wearing your other trousers yesterday.

One of the things we routinely fail to understand is that 'most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving.' We seek, in our desperation, for ways to make ourselves more lovable - we'll try to take better care of our fashion, our biceps, we'll earn more, learn more, we'll get a new vegan recipe book, learn to speak French - not as sources of self-actualisation but as ways of improving our market value, becoming a more desirable commodity in the 'personality market' (what Fromm would have made of online dating profiles, again, is anyone's guess). Eventually, we'll meet someone with a comparable market value, enter into a mutually beneficial transaction and then six months later find ourselves wondering where it all went wrong again.

In the enthusiastic hands of a Marxist philosopher with leanings towards Buddhism, this commodification of human relationships sounds truly dystopian, like a contestant on The Apprentice wandered onto the set of Blind Date:

'I am out for a bargain; the object should be desirable from the standpoint of its social value, and at the same time should want me, considering my overt and hidden assets and potentialities. Two persons thus fall in love when they feel they have found the best object available on the market, considering the limitations of their own exchange values.'

Its certainly not sexy, but nor is it a recipe for a long term relationship. If we treat our partners like commodities, they become similarly disposable when they have outlived their usefulness or we find that we're fulfilling a particular need in some other way. Its all too self serving and ego-driven and, for Fromm, one of our great tasks is to guard against this 'loving' of someone only in terms of what they can offer us.

Although he takes a whole book to work through his argument, the way out Fromm offers us can really be boiled down to a simple reconceptualisation of what love truly is. Love is not a 'pleasant sensation, which to experience is a matter of chance,' or 'something one "falls into" if one is lucky,' as Romeo so dramatically does. Love isn't a 'thing' at all but a carefully and painstakingly cultivated state of being. Perhaps the great mistake we've been making all these years is that we've been nouning where we ought to have been verbing.

He describes it like this:

'Love is a passionate affirmation of an ‘object’; it is not an ‘affect’ but an active striving and inter relatedness, the aim of which is the happiness, growth, and freedom of its object. It is a readiness which, in principle, can turn to any person and object including ourselves.'

There's absolutely no mention here of what the object of love can do for us, no mention of the satisfaction of pre-existing criteria. The do-er of the verb, as the linguists would tell us, is the subject. We ourselves must learn to cultivate a sense of 'readiness' for love which first involves the projection of love outwards, in all directions, to everyone. It’s only when we can love everyone, ourselves included, that we can love any one person. It’s the only way of seeing people as they really are rather than in terms of the benefits they can offer us.

If this sounds easy, that certainly wasn't Fromm's intention. Here's what he tells us about how to proceed:

'The first step to take is to become aware that love is an art, just as living is an art; if we want to learn how to love, we must proceed in the same way we have to proceed if we want to learn any other art…'

That means 24/7 immersion into your 'craft.' It means humility (and openness to growth), courage (to deal with setbacks), faith (that your work will bear fruit), and discipline (to maintain awareness and shine love outwards, every day).

As with any art, there's always someone who seems predisposed to success - there's always a Romeo - but the silver lining is there's also plenty of room for improvement for every one of us, with a little practice.

Is Music Shaped by the Environment in which It Is Heard? David Byrne on Creativity in Reverse #music

Ever since the day, a good few years ago now, that my iPod shuffle selected Krzysztof Penderecki's Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima as an accompaniment to the fifth kilometre of a 5k run, I've been of the opinion that certain types of music are best appreciated in a particular context.

It's jazz or chanson when it's an empty house and I'm up too late, ambient when it comes time to sleep and traditional folk/ folk revival when I'm letting the first signs of morning through the kitchen window. And so on. But, in How Music Works (2012), David Byrne makes a pretty convincing case that the music itself is likewise influenced enormously by the context in which - and for which - it was produced.

That might not sound like a particularly revealing insight but, as Byrne points out, it actually runs counter to the conventional wisdom about artistic creation, which maintains that:

'creation emerges out of some interior emotion, from an upwelling of passion or feeling, and that the creative urge will brook no accommodation, that it simply must find an outlet to be heard, read, or seen.'

For Byrne, what actually takes place when an artist puts pen to paper (or brush, or film strip, or whatever) is just about 180 degrees from this romanticised description. For him, 'we unconsciously and instinctively make work to fit pre-existing formats.'

He calls it 'creation in reverse,' and what he means is that we, perhaps unconsciously, create works that fit the venues we have available to us. It should come as no surprise to us that we 'mainly hear symphonies in symphony halls.'

Let's illustrate this with some examples.

Western music in the Middle Ages was performed mainly in stone churches, cathedrals, monasteries - places, essentially, where sound reverberates, and reverberates for a long time. In such buildings, a note can hang in the air for seconds, becoming 'part of the present sonic landscape.'

It's logical, therefore, that the music that developed in these spaces was modal in structure and used very long notes. What else could composers do? As Byrne argues, a 'composition with shifting musical keys would inevitably invite dissonance as notes overlapped and clashed,' causing 'a real sonic pileup.'

It's an interesting reversal of a critical consensus that has long maintained that medieval music was harmonically simple owing to the composer's lack of sophistication. The point that such a view misses is that harmonic complexity would, in an echo-ey stone monastery, have sounded absolutely awful. 'Creatively,' Byrne says, these medieval composers 'did exactly the right thing.'

The same is true for the traditional, rhythmically intricate percussive music we associate with Africa. Such music would commonly have been played outdoors, where layered and complex percussive patterns can avoid becoming 'mashed together' like they would in 'a school gymnasium' or stone church (or a teenager's bedroom for that matter).

And it isn't just traditional forms of music that are shaped by their respective environments. This same pattern of creativity 'in reverse' applies equally to more modern forms of popular music. Jazz, for instance, was originally played in bars, clubs and other places where dancing was going on. In such places, 'written' melody would often run-out before the dancers were ready to hang up their shoes. The improvisations by individual musicians - experimenting around a theme whilst keeping the same underlying groove - that would come to define the genre were therefore, originally, simply a creative solution to a specific problem in a specific environment.

Should any of this impact on our enjoyment of the music? Of course not. Byrne is at pains to point out that understanding something on a deeper level, far from destroying the magic, actually enhances it. I feel I'm preaching to the converted on that one, but here's his take anyway:

'Music isn't fragile. Knowing how the body works doesn't take away from the pleasure of living. Music has been around as long as people have formed communities. It's not going to go away, but its uses and meaning evolve. I am moved by more music now than I have ever been. Trying to see it from a wider and deeper perspective only makes it clear that the lake itself is wider and deeper than we thought.'

Extract of the Week #literature

I obviously find something of value in all the the snippets I share, or I wouldn't be sharing them. This one, however, feels a bit special. That Ted Hughes tucked this timeless wisdom away in a personal letter to his own son, never meant for publication, just makes one feel all the more privileged for being in its company.

‘That was a most curious and interesting remark you made about feeling, occasionally, very childish, in certain situations. Nicholas, don’t you know about people this first and most crucial fact: every single one is, and is painfully every moment aware of it, still a child. To get beyond the age of about eight is not permitted to this primate—except in a very special way, which I’ll try to explain.
It’s something people don’t discuss, because it’s something most people are aware of only as a general crisis of sense of inadequacy, or helpless dependence, or pointless loneliness, or a sense of not having a strong enough ego to meet and master inner storms that come from an unexpected angle. But not many people realise that it is, in fact, the suffering of the child inside them. Everybody tries to protect this vulnerable two three four five six seven eight year old inside, and to acquire skills and aptitudes for dealing with the situations that threaten to overwhelm it. So everybody develops a whole armour of secondary self, the artificially constructed being that deals with the outer world, and the crush of circumstances. And when we meet people this is what we usually meet. And if this is the only part of them we meet we’re likely to get a rough time, and to end up making ‘no contact’. But when you develop a strong divining sense for the child behind that armour, and you make your dealings and negotiations only with that child, you find that everybody becomes, in a way, like your own child. It’s an intangible thing. But they too sense when that is what you are appealing to, and they respond with an impulse of real life, you get a little flash of the essential person, which is the child. Usually, that child is a wretchedly isolated undeveloped little being. It’s been protected by the efficient armour, it’s never participated in life, it’s never been exposed to living and to managing the person’s affairs, it’s never been given responsibility for taking the brunt. And it’s never properly lived. That’s how it is in almost everybody. And that little creature is sitting there, behind the armour, peering through the slits. And in its own self, it is still unprotected, incapable, inexperienced. Every single person is vulnerable to unexpected defeat in this inmost emotional self. At every moment, behind the most efficient seeming adult exterior, the whole world of the person’s childhood is being carefully held like a glass of water bulging above the brim. And in fact, that child is the only real thing in them. It’s their humanity, their real individuality, the one that can’t understand why it was born and that knows it will have to die, in no matter how crowded a place, quite on its own. That’s the carrier of all the living qualities. It’s the centre of all the possible magic and revelation. What doesn’t come out of that creature isn’t worth having, or it’s worth having only as a tool—for that creature to use and turn to account and make meaningful. So there it is.’

That's only a snippet and - even at that length - it was painful to cut. So, if you liked its gist, please, please seek out the whole thing - you won't regret it.

Image of the Week #history #anthropology

As you wander the cobbled streets of Bergamo, Gubbio or other medieval Umbrian towns, you're likely to encounter mysterious walled up doors like the one pictured above. They come in different shapes and dimensions but are usually narrow, adjacent to the larger main entrance, and raised just above the street level.

These are known as porta del morto, or doors of the dead.

Behind these doors is a long staircase leading, without any corners, directly to the living quarters. There are practical explanations for the existence of these doors and staircases - security, for example - but over time they took on a new significance.

Upon the death of a family member, the straight staircase offered a convenient route for a coffin to be carried unimpeded from living space to the waiting funeral cart outside, thus avoiding the use of the main entrance, which was reserved for the living. This separation became not just practical but steeped in superstition, reflecting a belief that the dead should not reenter through the same doorway used by those still among the living.

After the funeral, the door would often be permanently sealed, leaving behind a wonderfully eerie architectural mystery which, for those who take the time to look, offers a glimpse into the spiritual traditions and rituals of the medieval world.

The Collection | Beautiful Lighthouses

When I was 17, I took the decision that Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse would be my favourite book, then at 18 I got around to reading it. It's safe to say I've always loved a lighthouse.

Here's a personal list of favourites; please feel free to take it as an invitation to celebrate your own favourites in the comments.

Les Éclaireurs Lighthouse (Argentina): This is what a lighthouse should look like. Like a child's drawing of a lighthouse. Set against the remote and icy landscapes of Tierra del Fuego, it's not difficult to see where it gets its nickname of The Lighthouse at the End of the World.

Rubjerg Knude Lighthouse (Denmark): First lit in December 1900, this North Sea facing relic is slowly (and romantically) being overtaken by sand dunes

Kiz Kulesi (Turkey): The story behind this Istanbul tower's name (Maiden’s Tower) is great. An oracle was said to have prophesied that the emperor’s daughter would die from a snake bite, so he built the tower to lock her up in. All for her protection, of course. Oh and it's a stunner.

Torre de Hércules (Spain): Built in the 1st century, The Tower of Hercules is the oldest known extant Roman lighthouse. A UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Phare de la Jument (France): Built on a rock about 300 metres from the coast of the island of Ushant. An engineering marvel and a symbol of resilience.

Chania Lighthouse (Greece): Built in 1864, Venetian in origin and absolutely gorgeous. This sits at the entrance of the port of Chania, on the island of Crete.

Heceta Head Lighthouse (USA): Opened in 1894 on the Oregon coast. The lush forest and rocky coastlines give this one a distinctly American feel.

The Examined Life

We're living in a world of Erich Fromm's nightmares. Dating apps, romantic comedies and social media reinforce the idea that love should be instantaneous and effortlessly fulfilling, much like buying a product that promises to solve all problems. To what extent does 21st century society's focus on consumerism and instant gratification affect our understanding of love, and how do we guard against it if it does?

The Humanities Library

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