
Love to hate: (book)
Why? is the simple, impulsive question we ask when confronted by horrible acts
of hatred and violence. Why do students shoot fellow students or employees
their coworkers? Why do mothers drown their children or husbands stalk and kill
their wives? Love to Hate challenges us to turn this question upon ourselves at a
deeper level. Why, as a culture, are we so fascinated by these acts? Why do we
bestow celebrity on the perpetrators, while allowing the victims to fade into a
second death of obscurity? Are we, as Pope John Paul II famously accused, "a
culture of death"? And if so, how can we break free of this unacknowledged
aspect of the cycle of violence? Unlike those who point solely to media imagery,
splintered families, or lax gun control laws in search of the roots of America's
endemic violence, Jody M. Roy suggests that we all must be held responsible. She
argues that we reveal our love affair with hatred and violence in the ways we
think and speak in our daily lives and in our popular culture. The very words we
use function as building blocks of callousness and contempt, betraying our
immersion in subtexts of violence and hatred. These subtexts are further revealed
in our complex attitudes toward street gangs, school shooters, serial killers, and
hate groups and the paroxysms of violence they unleash. As spectators, driven by
our impulse to watch, we become an integral part of the equation of violence. In
the book's final section, "Freeing Ourselves of Our Obsession with Hatred and
Violence," Roy offers practical steps we can take -- as parents, consumers, and
voters -- to free ourselves from linguistic and cultural complicity and to help
create in America a culture of life.
 Obsession: (book)
We live in an age of obsession. Not only are we hopelessly devoted to our
work, strangely addicted to our favorite television shows, and desperately
impassioned about our cars, we admire obsession in others: we demand that
lovers be infatuated with one another in films, we respond to the passion of
single-minded musicians, we cheer on driven athletes. To be obsessive is to be
American; to be obsessive is to be modern.
But obsession is not only a phenomenon of modern existence: it is a medical
category- both a pathology and a goal. Behind this paradox lies a fascinating
history, which Lennard J. Davis tells in Obsession. Beginning with the roots of
the disease in demonic possession and its secular successors, Davis traces the
evolution of obsessive behavior from a social and religious fact of life into a
medical and psychiatric problem. From obsessive aspects of professional
specialization to obsessive compulsive disorder and nymphomania, no variety
of obsession eludes Davis's graceful analysis.
 Love:
The philosophy of love For centuries, popular writers and respected scholars
have written about and analyzed the phenomenon of love without exhausting
its potential for contemporary debate. By representing the three major
traditions in the philosophy of love--Platonic eros, Christian agape, and
Aristotelian philia--editor Alan Soble has not only examined the intellectual
problem of what "love" is, but has designed a dialogue among the three
traditions in genuine philosophical style. "Eros is acquisitive, egocentric or
even selfish; agape is a giving love. Eros is an unconstant, unfaithful love, while
agape is unwavering and continues to give despite ingratitude. Eros is a love
that responds to the merit or value of its object; while agape creates value in
its object as a result of loving it... Finally, eros is an ascending love, the
human's route to God; agape is a descending love, God's route to humans...
Philia is caught between eros and agape."--From the Introduction to Eros,
Agape and Philia
ISSUES EXPLORED: --What is the state of love today as seen through the eyes
of Plato, Aristotle, and Paul? --How do relations between the sexes illustrate
the difficulties of love? --What are the nature and effects of exclusivity,
reciprocity, and constancy? --What are the conceptual and psychological ties
between sex and love? --Does it make any sense to think of love in moral
terms?
 Irish Revel
I am obsessed quite irrationally by the notion of love ..." writes Edna O'Brien.
"It's an obsession and I know it's very limiting. At the same time it's what I
feel truest and most persistently about, and therefore it's the thing that I have
to write about" (Rafroidi and Harmon 272). And write about it she does - the
obsession, that is, perhaps more than the love.
A reading of O'Brien's stories, beginning with the 1969 collection, The Love
Object, reveals that several of her characters share their author's obsession
with "the notion of love." Yet between these women and their love objects
there is so little real connection, so little love. For them, obsession with love
seems to stand in the way of its attainment.
That O'Brien's protagonists should find themselves in this bind is perhaps not
surprising. Obsession - a "persistent or inescapable preoccupation with an
idea or emotion" - seems to involve not only compulsion but insatiability. A
person obsessed, whether with an idee fixe or a person, seems disinclined, or
perhaps unable, to feed her obsession to the point of satiation. Obsession, like
addiction, sets in motion a self-fueling and potentially endless cycle. Love
and obsession are, in a sense, opposites. Obsession feeds on itself, is selfabsorbed, while love reaches beyond the self toward authentic contact with
another. In the stories considered here there are moments of genuine love and
compassion. But these occur only as their protagonists free themselves, or are
torn, from the grip of their obsession.
"Irish Revel," one of O'Brien's early stories from The Love Object, pictures
what might be called the birth of the obsession. It opens with a young country
girl, Mary, making her way by bicycle to town. She has been invited to a
party at the home of Mrs. Rogers, one of her "betters," and welcomes the ride
as an opportunity to entertain in solitude her treasured memories of John
Roland, the young painter she met two years earlier, also while visiting Mrs.
Rogers's house. Perhaps, magically, he will be there again.
Soon after her arrival at the party, she realizes not only that her dream of
seeing John is a groundless fantasy, but also that she has only been invited to
serve guests, clean up, and add color to the affair. She takes shelter in
daydreaming again of John and remembers a ride she took with him on his
bicycle: "They did not talk for miles; she had his stomach encased in the
delicate and frantic grasp of a girl in love and no matter how far they rode
they seemed always to be riding into a golden haze" (O'Brien, Love Objects
96). She then recalls his calling her "Sweet Mary" and remembers his
explanation that "he could not love her, because he already loved his wife and
children ..." (97).
At the close of "Irish Revel," Mary returns home burdened with her fruitless
hopes and crushed by the ordinariness and crudity of the party. She stops
briefly for a view of the countryside from a hill above her home and surveys
it in a way that clearly echoes Joyce's language in "The Dead" (Eckley 81).
However, instead of the falling snow that Gabriel Conroy views from his
hotel window, a snow that softens the harsh outlines of the physical world
and suggests gentle acceptance, Mary witnesses an unforgiving frost:
The poor birds could get no food, as the ground was frozen hard. Frost was
general all over Ireland; frost like a weird blossom on the branches, on the
riverbank from which Long John Salmon leaped in his great, hairy
nakedness, on the plough left out all winter; frost on the stony fields, and on
all the slime and ugliness of the world. (O'Brien, Love Object 113).
 Partner Stalking: How Women Respond, Cope, and
Survive

Despair surrounds her on all sides, from the frozen, unyielding landscape to
the equally grim vista of her family's cottage, evoking as it does the specter of
a dead-end life: "She was at the top of the hill now, and could see her own
house, like a little white box at the end of the world, waiting to receive her"
(114). …