The Horror of Love

A really excellent essay on the many roles of love – and roles denied love – in our lives and popular culture:

A Point of View: The Horror of Love
by A.L. Kennedy

We would find it bizarre if a parent was more worried about dropping a vase than dropping their baby – even a Ming vase and an ugly baby. An absence of love within a family or a relationship is taken as a sign of something having gone very wrong.

But an absence of love in the world we help construct around us, that's regarded as a form of common sense. We are used to making decisions – or having them made for us – which would save the vase and not the baby. We tell each other "there's no room for sentiment." In seeking to establish, acquire, and retain what is valuable to us, we can ignore the usefulness of affection in determining value, and employ numerical and financial calculations of worth. We can get lost in numbers.

So when, say, the performance of rubber O-rings on the Space Shuttles was analysed, statistical warning signs were addressed on paper, but a pressing danger was allowed to remain in the real world. And at low temperature, an O-ring failed, predictably, on the Challenger, and seven human beings died in what became a burning coffin, far from home. Not enough people in the right places remembered that caring about people more than figures would be essential, until it was too late.

... Love really can be like light: it lets us see each other, and what matters.