In my limited and brief experience, I have never seen anything that came close to the selfless conception of love. On the contrary, the examples that life tried to provide me have always enhanced love as a highlight of selfishness. Moreover, I easily identify love when I see it converted into hatred, in a very natural process, when pride, wounded, dispenses with the scruples and shows up in greatest vigour.
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It is Monday. The guy wakes up early, and he is headed for work, where he spends the day. He turns home, exhausted, where he have a few hours left before bed. The next day, he repeats the routine, and then and then, waiting at the end of the month a salary. Weekends: if the money is plentiful — or lacks, — it is time to employ it to get some pleasure. One, two, twenty years passes, and the guy remains in the routine, already eager for the day when the state will pay him the monthly costs. I ask: freedom, if in homeopathic doses, would not be slavery? Or: not realizing being slave would not, in essence, be a brain pathology? Anyway, I recognize: it is better that everything stays as it is, either because of the calmness of the routine or the scarcity of antidepressants in the market.
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“To love and to be loved”: this is capitalism applied to affective relations, showing us its immense vigor. I could say: only love those who do not require anything in return, or love is precisely to expect nothing. But how outdated it would sound! Today is all an exchange: “I generate value, then I want my retribution!” And it is naïve to think that the exchanges do not apply to everything, that the greatest of loves or the tiniest of conventions could not be summarize in a relation of exchange. To observe this, it takes only a modest interior examination…
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The Intellectual Life, by Antonin-Dalmace Sertillanges is, above all, a practical book: a manual intended for all those who seek to structure a life that exceeds everyday banality. I say for my part: when, by my twenties, I came across this work, I found precisely what I needed: the motivation and the means to architect a plan of long-term studies, recognizing the importance of habits, the selection of readings, the solitude, in short: the organization of life to intellectual progress. And I remember the pleasure in breathing those beautiful pages of Sertillanges, gifted with contagious serenity, justifying, elevating and ennonoking intellectual work. No doubt it’s book to close inspired, grateful and motivated.
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