Love's Work

When she was still a teenager, Gillian Rose legally changed her last name from "Stone" to her stepfather's name, "Rose." She would henceforth be a Rose. Yet, at the same time, she would also remain a Stone, regardless of the legal ritual. For Gillian Rose, dying at a young age from a terrible cancer and trying, as the subtitle of her memoir suggests, to come to a "reckoning with life," the name change becomes a metaphor for what it means to be a human being. Life is a combination of jagged rocks which rip the flesh and weary the feet on the one hand, and the delicate aroma and beauty of roses on the other. It does no good to focus on one at the exclusion of the other. Such exclusivity is a delusion, and delusions always wind up being deflated by real life. Love's work, for Rose, is the earnest effort to embrace life, both its stones and its roses, in all its joyful and heartbreaking complexity. To be embodied, enfleshed, and at the same time capable of emotions and reason, is to inhabit a space in which one is continuously encountering transcendent moments that quickly get bounded by limitations of existence. But this dance between the two is what makes life so interesting, so worthwhile, and it is love's work to keep in the dance. As Rose writes (p. 105), "To grow in love-ability is to accept the boundaries of oneself and oneself, while remaining vulnerable, woundable, around the boundaries. Acknowledgement of conditionality is the only unconditionality of human love." Growing in love-ability is wondrous, but can also bring agony. And yet, concludes Rose, it's important to embrace both. Otherwise, one "dies deadly" rather than "dying forward into the intensified agon of living" (p. 77). In all this, one is reminded of Nietzsche's amor fati: loving one's life, the painful as well as the joyful, the tragic and the comic, the horrific and the sublime, because all of it IS one's life. Rose's style mirrors her conviction that live is a continuous interplay of stones and roses, and it can make for some difficulty at times in deciphering her meaning. Her writing is associative, one thought flowing into another, images cascading over themselves without warning. She moves effortlessly, for example, from a discussion of sanitation at Auschwitz to colostomies, from the divorce of her parents to her own dyslexia, from the AIDS that kills her friend Jim to reflections on Plato, Pascal, and Hume. But the patient reader will begin to cotton on to Rose's style. It may still remain difficult, but it will also reveal itself as exactly the right style for what she wants to say. "Keep your mind in hell, and despair not." This is the epigram Rose chooses for her book, and it's entirely appropriate. Note that the two clauses are connected by "and," not "but." Life isn't so much about "either/or" as it is about "and." Face life for what it is, which can frequently mean that one's mind is in a hellish place of fear, pain, suffering, lonelin

This is a very special book, one that every sentient adult should read at some point in their lives. It is an adult book - shocking, moving , unsettling, hopeful. It is in some ways the companion text to Rose's 'Mourning becomes the law'. That was the definitive statement of her philosophy; this is how it applies to her lived life. The concept of 'failing towards' underpins both. Rose was clever enough to make and occupy a unique position in modern philosophy. It was a position informed by her (sometimes overpowering) erudition, but also by her profound spirituality. She onece described herself as 'too Jewish to be a Christian, and too Christian to be Jewish'. In fact on her deathbed she was received into the Anglican church. The very last stage of her journey was, according to the bishop who baptised her, an acceptance that in the person of Christ 'God was present in healing power'.

This extraordinary book explains the powerful life of one woman in a way that impacts us all. The interconnectedness of living, learning and loving are demonstrated through the author's personal experiences which travel through europe, New York City and even Bennington, Vermont. Somehow the improbable happenings of her life find a way of relating closely to our own. I recommend this book.

Extremely well written and seeped in verisimilitudes, this book contains a wonderful 'manifesto' of living. Instead of hiding behind comfortable scholarship, Rose uses scholarship to dig deeper into the uglier, messier side of life. We all know how to avoid reality; this books reveals one woman's attempt at facing it squarely. This books is a courageous example of dennoch preisen. Afterwards, I was painfully aware of issues I hadn't thought about in a long time. I thoroughly recommend this book.