Love Loves to Love Love.

A Valentine's Day post featuring Ted Lasso, a literary titan, and a Nobel laureate...very romantic

So I finally started watching “Ted Lasso.” I know, I know — where have I been? I’m basically that guy in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it. It is, though, often maudlin. But I think that’s ok, even when it tips into excessive sentimentality. Because I think the show is about love, and vulnerability. It’s about taping a silly, handwritten “BELIEVE” sign over a door and forcing it to mean something. 

The messages in the show strike notes about love and trust and caring that everyone understands, and that everyone values, and yet that are hard to act upon or even articulate in daily life. I like that the show is willing to be maudlin, because even though we all know those messages, maybe we still need to hear them — repeatedly. My friend Brad Stulberg often talks about things that are simple but not easy, and I think love falls into that bucket. 

Which brings me to something that is neither simple nor easy … Ulysses! If you’ve been reading this newsletter long enough, you won’t be surprised that my idea of Valentine’s Day romance is mining Ulysses for love. (My wife is a very lucky woman?)

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The first publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, in 1922, contained a lot of errors. 

That was inevitable, given the laborious process of preparing a 735-page book for print at that time. Beyond the inevitable typos, so to speak, Joyce used words in unfamiliar ways, incorporated multiple languages, concocted portmanteaus, and just plain created new words. Thus, printers assumed that some of these novelties were errors and “corrected” them. 

In a famous instance, the dot at the end of the penultimate chapter was intended by Joyce to be larger than a normal period, but a printer assumed it was dirt or a flyspeck, and excised it. Over the years, Joyce corrected some of the errors, while successive printers introduced new ones. 

In the 1980s, professor Hans Walter Gabler went through all of the available manuscript evidence to make a definitive edition of Ulysses, meant to reflect Joyce’s final intentions. Published in 1984, it contained 5,000 alterations, or about 7 per page. Yikes. 

But most of them are completely inconsequential, and a reader would never notice. There are a few, though, that are slightly consequential, and one that is clearly consequential. 

That one has to do with a scene in which Stephen Dedalus — a young artist and Joyce’s alter ego — is in a brothel in the midst of a sort of drunken, waking fever dream in which he sees a vision of his recently-deceased mother’s ghost. Stephen remembers his mother singing to him when he was a boy, and implores her ghost: “Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word known to all men.” The ghost does not respond. 

So what is the word? Like so much in Ulysses, it has been the subject of debate. As Joyce scholar Richard Ellman wrote: “...one critic maintains that it is death, and another that it is synteresis; the latter sounds like the one word unknown to all men.” Scholar burn! 

Gabler settled the debate by finding an omitted passage from a scene earlier in the book that prefigures the answer. It reads:

“Do you know what you are talking about? Love, yes. Word known to all men.” 

Honestly, this is what a close reader of the book (other than the “synteresis” guy) would guess, as it is subtly reinforced in other spots. 

In one of my favorite scenes Leopold Bloom, the everyman protagonist of Ulysses, is having a tense conversation in a bar with a violent nationalist (known only as the Citizen) who views him as an outsider to Ireland because he’s a Jew. The Citizen is holding forth about historical wrongs and his desire for vengeance, when Bloom shares:

“But it’s no use…Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life.” 

“What?” the Citizen asks, bemused.

“Love,” Bloom says sheepishly. “I mean the opposite of hatred.” 

The Citizen and his gang lampoon Bloom as preachy and effeminate. But one of the Citizen’s drinking buddies meekly weighs in, sort of on Bloom’s side: “Well…Isn’t that what we’re told. Love your neighbour.” 

The Citizen, now caught between a rock and an impious place, changes tack and just lambasts Bloom as too ridiculous and miserly to tell anyone anything about love anyway. 

One of the two omniscient narrators in that chapter (yes, there are two, basically a normal one and a creative one) chimes in: “Love loves to love love.” 

As Ellman writes of the scene: “It is the kind of parody that protects seriousness by immediately going away from intensity. Love cannot be discussed without peril, but Bloom has nobly named it.” 

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Here comes the part where I’ll risk being maudlin, but protect my own seriousness by making sure to do it in someone else’s words. 

Since I started writing my first book more than a decade ago, I’ve bumped into the work of Herbert Simon in nearly every field of science that I’ve explored. I don’t even know how to describe Simon. Wikipedia calls him a political scientist. But most of his work that I’ve read is in cognitive psychology, related to human judgment and problem solving. Then again, he is sometimes called a “founding father” of artificial intelligence. Plus, he wrote a genre-defining business management textbook. And then there’s that Nobel Prize he won, which was in economics. Go figure. 

I had not, however, come across anything Simon had written about love, until recently. This passage, which I’ll end with, comes from a book Simon wrote in 1965 about, of all things, the potential impact of automation on society:

“Man is a problem-solving, skill-using, social animal. Once he has satisfied his hunger, two main kinds of experiences are significant to him. One of his deepest needs is to apply his skills, whatever they be, to challenging tasks — to feel the exhilaration of the well-struck ball or the well-solved problem. The other need is to find meaningful and warm relations with a few other human beings — to love and be loved, to share experience, to respect and be respected, to work in common tasks.” 

And so, whether today or someday soon, I wish you warm relations with a few other human beings, respect, and work in common tasks. 

Thanks for reading. Until next time…

David

P.S. Eric Barker’s “Barking Up the Wrong Tree” is the newsletter that got me interested in newsletters. It’s smart, funny, and full of tips, and yesterday’s post was a Q&A with yours truly. I highly recommend Eric’s newsletter, and you can read that Q&A here: “This Is The Most Fun Way To Make Your Life Awesome.”

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