​Chapter 21. Love

Relation left two names holding each other across a gap, and a gap can stay cold. I name the other, the other answers, and the two of us still only stand opposite, each keeping the other from collapsing into a thing, with nothing more crossing between. Love begins where the gap stops being only held and becomes a place of acting, where two names enter a single gesture while staying two.

A feeling can ride along with this and never hold it. It arrives and leaves, runs hot and goes quiet, and a thing that does all of that is residue, the passing weather of a body. A love resting on the feeling alone lasts exactly as long as the weather. The feeling can attend love and report it; it does not carry it.

Nor does any quality of the other carry it. Beauty, intelligence, strength, the pull of sex, a long shared history, can each account for attraction, for desire and admiration, and each can be weighed and compared, the same trait turning up again in someone new. A bond held by the quality comes loose the day the quality does. Love begins where the other is not used up by the list, where something answers across the meeting that no inventory of traits has caught.

What love does, it does alongside. One acts neither over the other, as a hand over a tool, nor for the other, as a charge to be tended, nor in the other's place, taking the act away. One acts beside the other, by answering what the other did. A gesture calls a gesture and lays no mechanism on it; the second is a reply and not an output. The other stays clear of every reduced shape, the instrument, the possession, the mirror that hands back a face. Two names keep their distance, and their separate acts begin to make a single movement, made single by each one's answer to the other.

Closeness is where the danger gathers, because every counterfeit of love is the gap closed under the look of nearness. Fusion shuts it outright, dissolving the two, and where one being is left there is no one to answer to. The quieter closings leave the two standing opposite and drain the gap between them. The other gets held instead of met, kept and watched, his comings and goings turned into something of mine to manage. Or the warmth aims past him at a corrected version already marked as the right one, so that the man in front is loved as the draft of someone he is meant to become. Or an image of him is answered in his place, until the day he cracks the image and the crack reads as betrayal. The role may do the loving, the place mattering and the one who fills it interchangeable. Each makes the nearing other into something easier to keep, a possession or a fate.

So love shows itself at one particular break. The image of the other gives way, he answers in a way no one waited for, walks out of the role, loses the very trait the wanting hung on, and in that moment the thing is tested. If the relation turns him at once into a problem to be solved, a defect to be corrected, then what was held all along was the image and not the name. Love is the bond that meets the broken image and keeps the other unreduced, neither error nor stranger's accident, still the one answered to. Love of a natureless being is the love that leaves room for the other's next act to come unforeseen.

This carries the same shape freedom has. A free act cannot be drawn in advance out of the residue, and a love cannot be drawn out of the traits of the one loved. Neither comes out random for that. Once it has happened, no one can show why this other and not another became the beloved, and no one looking at it needs to. It stands as this bond between these two, known as itself.

Which is why love is the most dangerous relation there is. The co-action that holds it can turn to capture instantly, and the stronger the bond the lighter the turn. The closer two come, the easier it grows to sign the other over: mine, my fate, my other half, the one who owes me a certain answer. Love sits nearest of all to freedom, two names acting from themselves across a living gap, and for that same nearness it sits nearest to a new wall. It offers the most closeness, and with it the strongest pull to shut the gap that closeness opened.

A name can be held across counter-action as well. The true enemy goes unreduced the way the beloved does; no dirt, no symptom, no specimen of a class, no error, met as himself and stood against. That belongs to another mode of relation, and not to love. It stands here only to mark the edge: holding another's name is not love's alone to do, and love is the form of nearness in which the gap is forbidden to close. Love makes the distance between two names alive. It has no wish to end the other's aloneness, no wish to own or cure it. It acts beside that aloneness and lets it answer.

Love between natures is love of a matching deposit. I love what confirms me, what answers in the key I already hold. Agreement, shared taste, a temperament that fits — each is a surface of residue pressed against another, and the bond lasts while the surfaces match. Let the other hold a different opinion, take a turn I did not foresee, pick up an interest that has nothing to do with mine, and the love flinches, because what was loved was the agreement, and the person behind it was never reached. The flinch is the proof: where a mismatch in deposit breaks the bond, the bond was running between deposits.

Christ says: love your neighbor. A man hears the command and means to follow it. He has not stripped his nature; he comes as he is, carrying his image of the good and the deserving. He can love the saint, the man who matches the picture his goodness drew. The one standing in front of him who does not pass, the drunk, the bore, the heretic — that one he can pity, perhaps, or tolerate, each of which is a closing of the gap under a kinder word. A natured being loves a nature. To love the neighbor as a name, unreduced by any image of what the neighbor should be, the one loving would have to stand as a name himself, stripped of the deposit that sorts the lovable from the rest. The command asks for what the nature cannot give.