Love's Work

I think of Love's Work like the small hunk of tungsten I once held, so dense that it immediately sank my hand to the desktop beneath. It's a short book, with few words on each page, but it carries weight. Rose, a philosopher by profession, doesn't waste words, and among the things she doesn't tell you, until halfway through the book, is that she is dying. She's writing with urgency, then, but you sense that she wrote, and lived, with this clipped, exact intensity her whole life. There are whole sentences and paragraphs so packed with meaning I'm still sorting them out, but I never lose my faith in the clarity of her intention, or my joy at the force of her thinking, especially about those two central elements, love and death, that give life, and her "desperately mortal" life in particular, its greatest meaning.