To understand what love is, read the stories that history tells | Aeon Essays

Neither psychology nor anthropology fully understand love: only history sees that it’s all about the time and the telling

The top song on Billboard’s Rhythm & Blues chart in 1967 was Jackie Wilson’s (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher. Once (he sang), he had been ‘down-hearted’. Then he found a special girl. Now he’s flying high. Next, compare the feeling of love in Wilson’s song with that of Odysseus in Homer’s epic the Odyssey. The eponymous hero doesn’t want to fly. When the beautiful goddess Calypso tries to keep him as her bedmate, he turns her down even though she promises him immortality – a place with the gods. He wants to go home, to his wife. He wants to be grounded – quite literally,…

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