We have all felt that energetic fission of the instant attraction – the moment when two people catch each other’s eye and feel as though they’d been hit by a thunderbolt. It feels as if the universe has conspired to bring them to precisely this moment at this place, and from the split-second they lock eyes, each sees their destiny bound up in the other. That destiny may last an hour, it may last fifty years, but they know at that moment that life as they know it is over, because after realizing the existence of that other person, colors look different, words no longer carry the same meanings, and the songs on the radio make sense. And from the numinous shock of that first contact they hate each other with the Promethean fire of a million supernovas and desire nothing more out of life than to devote their remaining years to making the other person miserable beyond measure.
It’s like the time oil first laid eyes on water, or the dog on the mailman, or fingernails on a chalkboard. Occasionally a person comes along who so toxically offends your sense of everything beautiful in the world that you can only thank God every day for such a gift as a person who so conveniently explains our world’s division of good from evil. Had people like this particular person never born, the world would be a far better place than it is. All it requires is a single interaction, a particular emphasis laid on a certain word, a well-placed comma in an e-mail, and all the world’s evil makes sense. In the annals of human villainy, there’s Hitler, Nero, Genghis Kahn, and this person.
Just like in love, if we’re lucky, we get the pleasure of being in hate more than half-a-dozen times during our life. Food tastes better, drinks are more potent, and the weight of life’s burdens disappears from our shoulders. When we’re in love, we experience a respite during which we think the awfulness of the world could be redeemed. When we’re in hate, the feeling is savory rather than sweet, and just like with savory food, it is sometimes more pleasurable than any amount of sweetness. Rather than we having a respite from life’s torments, we possess something potentially better - a mastery of life’s bitterness, and an explanation for why life must be so. The act of living, with all the tragic messiness and misunderstandings which that carries, has meaning and explanation for the first time, and with such a divine gift the sour becomes more pleasurable than the sweet.
We all have such people who offend every concept of what we think is good and decent in the universe. If we’re wise, we’re simply thankful they exist. How could we make sense of the world’s horrors without them? But like love, hatred is fickle, and as a species we’re no more evolved to remain monogamous with the object of our sworn animus than we are to the object of our sworn affection. Human stuff is frail, and a surfeit of emotion makes him sway from the ground: too much love causes men to fly above the earth into the decompressed airlessness of the heavens, too much hate causes men to dig themselves into the suffocating dirt of the ground.
But all of us have those people who simply make the world lousy. Just as there is someone – perhaps a thousand someones – in the world for every person to develop a life-long loving bond in the correct circumstances, there are perhaps a thousand someones in the world with whom in the right circumstances we all can seal a lifelong bond of hatred.
Just as in love, there must be precisely the correct mixture of similarities and differences – both in interests and temperament. But there must also be that extra special something – a bond that can only be sealed in the moment when destiny conspires with coincidence who colludes with happenstance to bring two people together so precisely that the right circumstances of vulnerability, aspiration, and sensibility are met to produce this extra special bond. All one has to do is think of the other person, and the world’s confusion makes sense.
Why do we feel this way? What is it within us which provides the dopamine and adrenaline, either in love or in hate, which simplifies the world so? Why do we feel so completely as though our instinct is completely right, and no rational consideration is necessary? Why can’t we separate ourselves from these powerful emotions to realize that we currently have no greater claim on how our understanding of the world is correct than we did before we met this person? What if such a person does not share our hate? Ugliness is in the eye of the beholder, and is there any worse feeling than knowing that we reside in the mind of the object of our animus or affection with none of the intensity with which they reside in ours?
Is hatred more powerful than love? And if it isn’t…how terrible would it be for us if we found a way to make it so? Really. Would it make the world any worse a place if we found out hatred is more powerful than love? And would anybody really be surprised if that were the case?
0 comments:
Post a Comment