What Is This Thing Called Love?

There is a thread that transcends and unites people across time and space.

Image: Reynolds and Alma, The Phantom Thread, palyvoice.com

My daughter lost a beloved pet last week. Bailey was a slate grey Holland Lop rabbit that we got for her when she was going through a particularly rough time seven years ago. To the extent that it’s possible with a mammal from the family Leporidae, Bailey became her best friend. As the one who found her lifeless body, I deliberated with myself for a full 12 hours, unsure about how to break the news to her. After the difficult deed was done, Bailey was swaddled up in a blanket and ensconced in a small box on which my daughter tearfully wrote the words “Best Bunny, Bailey.” Thus, she began the wild process of trying to accept the unacceptable. 

Few emotions are as painful as missing someone. When asked by her father if she knew what the word love meant, writer Sebastian Junger’s two-year-old daughter answered, “Yes, love means stay here.” But, as we know all too well, there are times when we cannot stay and others in which those whom we most need will never be back. What then? There would appear to be few effective avenues available to deal with this undesirable state of affairs, but to the extent that they can, everyone gives it a shot, though not always in the most obvious ways.

Some spend their lives in a never-quite-complete process of trying to preserve or recapture some remnant of their loved ones. In the 2017 film Phantom Thread, haute couture designer Reynolds Woodcock is haunted by the death of his mother and (oddly) sews hidden messages into unseen hems of the garments he makes. Though subtle in the film, it seems to me that Woodcock has dedicated his life to making beautiful dresses for elegant women, not so much for their benefit but as a totemistic act to assuage the pain of his longing for his mom. She’s the phantom in the thread. In a fever-induced vision, Woodcock gazes at her ghostly visage and declares, “I miss you. It’s as simple as that.” 

Alan Turing is another (real-life) genius whose primary work was motivated by a secret desire to overcome the acute despondency of missing someone. As explained by philosopher Jennifer Hansen:

Mathematician, Nazi codebreaker, and early explorer of Artificial Intelligence Alan Turing fell in love with a boy, Christopher Marcom, at the Sherborne School and, for the first time, was no longer suffering from “utter loneliness” owing to his awkward, idiosyncratic, shy, and budding yearnings. Tragically, and so soon after they befriended each other, Christopher died of tuberculosis. Christopher’s death set Turing on the path of finding him again in an artificially intelligent machine believing “Chris is in some way alive now…but just separated from us for the present.”

After immersing himself in the mathematics of quantum physics, the young Alan mused that if he could build a new mechanical body for Christopher, he could be reunited with him. And so, one could assert that the quest to build intelligent, sentient, conscious machines sprung from the most human of needs, namely, to overcome loneliness.

Image: magicianmasterclass.com

Harry Houdini was another pained soul who dearly loved his mother, describing her as “A figure of transcendent love and selfless devotion.” After she died, he spent much of his time as a spiritualism buster. He would attend seances, which were highly fashionable and popular in his day, and out the mediums as frauds and charlatans. The public assumed he was a magician dedicated to debunking the tricks of other magicians as perfectly natural. Secretly, he was hoping against hope that one of these mediums would prove authentic and convey some scrap of a communication from his dearly departed mom and fill the yawning chasm of her absence. To the best of my knowledge, he failed in this endeavor. 

While there is no antidote to the lack of physical proximity to those we love but do not have access to, there is a thread that transcends and unites people (and perhaps animals) across time and space. The word we have for this mysterious field is love. Love is one of those things that everyone knows but struggles to define. Is it a pleasurable feeling? Not always. Is it just an emotion like all others? I think most would say it’s unique. It would seem strange from an evolutionary standpoint that we would continue to love that which can no longer provide any material benefit nor from which we can derive any. How does it help?

The film Interstellar has a fantastic scene in which two astronauts (Cooper and Brand) are trying to pick which world to explore for possible life as the Earth was slowly dying. With limited time and resources, the decision was critical — but how to make it? Brand was in love with another astronaut who had preceded them to one of the planets and had placed himself in a state of hibernation. She suggested that love was enough of a guide to choose that world:

COOPER: It [love] means social utility — child rearing, social bonding.

BRAND: We love people who've died … where's the social utility in that? Maybe it means more – something we can't understand yet. Maybe it's some evidence, some artifact of higher dimensions that we can't consciously perceive. I'm drawn across the universe to someone I haven't seen for a decade, who I know is probably dead. Love is the one thing we're capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that, even if we can't yet understand it.

These lines, written by Christopher and Jonathan Nolan, are profound. Perhaps love, the prime directive of all human life, the un-useful yet massively powerful force, is not part of this physical world at all. If so, then perhaps it is the only way to remain connected to those who have departed this material existence — and the only hope of plugging the desperate, insatiable hole that opens whenever true love is generated between two beings.