Learning to Love

One must learn to love. - This is what happens to us in music: First one has to learn to hear a figure and melody at all, to detect and distinguish it, to isolate it and delimit it as a separate life. Then it requires some exertion and good will to tolerate it in spite of its strangeness, to be patient with its appearance and expression, and kindhearted about its oddity: - finally there comes a moment when we are used to it, when we wait for it, when we sense that we should miss it if it were missing: and now it continues to compel and enchant us relentlessly until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers who desire nothing better from the world than it and only it. - But that is what happens to us not only in music. that is how we have learned to love all things that we now love. In the end we are always rewarded for our good will, our patience, fairmindedness, and gentleness with what is strange; gradually, it sheds its veil and turns out to be a new and indescribable beauty...

This is a passage from Nietzche's The Gay Science (§334) quoted on the recently created Nietzsche Blog. It really struck me when reading it - usually we assume that loving is something that we do naturally as human beings, but Nietzsche argues for a very different conception of love.

For Nietzsche, love is an acquired taste - it is something that you develop after some effort. Notice how there is no mention of loving something which is already familiar and common - does that suggest, then, that we can only come to really love something which is not already familiar to us? Must true love always be something which is cultivated around that which is at first foreign and strange? Perhaps.

This is also about more than just love; it's also about taking things for granted. When you become too comfortable in what is around you, never seeking out that which might make you a bit uncomfortable in its oddness, then you become complacent and take for granted that which you have. You may have learned to love in the past, but it becomes more like an unused appendage that withers in paralysis.

Preventing this decline wouldn't just be about seeking out the new, but also seeking out the new in what appears to be old - rediscovering new things in that which you thought you already understood. You can do this with music, with philosophy, and certainly also with people. Don't assume that your relationships have reached their high point - take another, closer look and see what you might discover anew.

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