What is Love?

The 2014 novel In the Light of What We Know by Zia Haider Rahman explores the breakdown of a cross-cultural relationship which ended disastrously. The participants, a woman from an upper-class English background and a man from a poor Bangladeshi background, believed they had found love. But what is love?

The Bangladeshi immigrant to Britain was intelligent and had made his way through the state education system, becoming a successful financier and lawyer. Through this, he encountered English class and privilege, and a world he could never really fit into or be comfortable in. He fell in love with a girl from that class. Or did he just think or believe he did?

Rahman’s novel is a cross-cultural masterpiece, using the financial and legal worlds of the City of London and New York as its backdrop. But what it really covers is how we look at ourselves, our past, our history and its effect on emotion and development as we move further and further away from our roots.

What the participants in the story really discovered is that the feeling we call “love” cannot be defined or known, it is simply an emotional feeling, a part of each person’s journey, in which they gain knowledge and understand the world and themselves better. Love is not about its aspects, which can include such things as giving, helping, or even hatred – it is always about the journey itself.

Love is not something we can look back on and analyse, question what happened, why we did what we did, felt what we felt, question time passing, question memory, belief, truth, history, the past. Love is something that immerses humans and then passes. It is part of our journey, and should be seen as such.

It cannot be defined or analysed beyond this, because to do so might make us go crazy (as the Bangladeshi hero of the novel appeared to do in the end). Love should be allowed to flow over and through, and let go when it naturally ends. Attempts to control or capture it are futile and end badly.

It is always better to open our eyes, and gain knowledge, than live in delusion.

The English poet A E Houseman said (and this was a hundred years ago, so nothing has changed):

“Knowledge, and especially disagreeable knowledge, cannot by any art be totally excluded even from those who do not seek it. The house of delusions is cheap to build, but drafty to live in, and ready at an instant to fall; and it is surely truer prudence to move our furniture betimes into the open air than to stay indoors until our tenement tumbles about our ears. It is and must in the long run be better for a man to see things as they are than to be ignorant of them”. 

We spend a lot of time across the course of our lives shielding our beliefs from evidence that would contradict those beliefs. Reality has no way of forcing itself on us.

Listening to people is hard because we run the risk of having to change the way we see the world.

We need an answer when love ends, or when a reality appears which changes our perception. We can perhaps do no better than the words of Dante Alighieri when he said:

 incipit vita nova [“Here begins the new life”].

Just let the journey continue.

10 May 2023

[Book review: Zia Haider Rahman – “In the Light of What We Know”]