What does love have to do with it?

At the risk of being howled down (in my own imagination!) I wanted to write something about love – the broad, compassionate Agape kind, in the Greek definition, rather than romantic and sexual Eros necessarily, although that kind of love is good too. I wanted to write about how I think this compassionate kind of love could lead to a deep empathy with our created characters, and especially with those who behave differently from ourselves and hold different values. I have been thinking that this kind of love is a strong partner to authenticity and integrity for the novelist. I have been thinking about this for a while, but wasn’t quite sure how to put it, or even if I could implicitly claim it, as it is possibly one of the most difficult things to achieve.

I think it is so much easier to be callous and cynical these days if you want to look smart, and possibly in some quarters cynical is more socially and critically accepted when something is being judged as realistic, serious writing. Love, compassion and kindness are often seen as soft options, or as best contained within a religious paradigm, as if they can't credibly exist outside this container, either in life or in writing. Nevertheless I would suggest that they do, commonly, and that love and the humanity of the characters that we create, are tied together; that we need to feel real love for the identities that we create on the pages that we write, and that if one separates love and character, love and the humanity of the book, there will be an impoverishment of what might have been. I think this because I believe love opens up understanding and possibility, whereas cynicism throws up the barriers and leads to suspicion and the closing down of possibilities. Cynicism is a protective mechanism, understandable, but if invariably employed, too inflexible for unlimited exploration in writing.

So I was heartened to read an article in the weekend’s Weekend Australian Review magazine, entitled: Love, not reason, at heart of human rights, in which Miriam Cosic reviewed a book by Alexandre Lefebvre. The book she reviewed is called: Human Rights as a Way of Life: On Bergson’s Political Philosophy. Lefebvre was a student of Henri Bergson, a French Philosopher who was born in 1859, and who worked with US President Woodrow Wilson to create the League of Nations which, although flawed, hoped to prevent future wars, following the First World War.

The reviewer Cosic writes, ‘As the cover (to the book) has it: “For Bergson, the main purpose of human rights is to initiate all human beings into love”… In Lefebvre’s take on it, love can nurture not only those in need of protection but those who extend the protection too.’

And when I read this it occurred to me that one of the assumptions that I have made with regard to the responsibility of the writer, all along, is that writing at its best is about human rights and about working towards initiating human beings into love or returning them to love. I have been assuming that whatever we write has the potential to add something to the world that might make it a slightly more understanding, loving and compassionate place. No, I am not a religious person, and certainly I am no Mother Teresa, but I do like that quote: “Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.”

Maybe this is the new way of the interconnected cyber-world. Each one of us who makes our voice heard has the potential to do small things with great love.