On Agape

A poem landed in my texts at eight in the morning: Frost going out to clean the pasture spring, going out to fetch the little calf, and twice, at the end of each small errand, turning around to say You come too. I texted back before nine that it was me. Not that I liked it. That it was me. I am usually the one holding the door open before anyone asks, the one saying you come too first, and here was a farmer in 1914 doing my whole personality in eight lines about a calf.

That same week I went through my Instagram saved folder, twenty-one posts deep, expecting to find what a saved folder is supposed to hold: things about love, meaning things about people. Some of it was. Healers need to date protectors. A psychologist explaining that we choose partners by nervous-system familiarity. Lists of questions to ask someone you want to know. But the rest of the folder had quietly stopped being about anyone. Roger Federer keeping a pinky promise to an eight-year-old, five years later, in Zurich. A Stoic account captioned amor fati. Marcus Aurelius telling me not to disturb myself by imagining my whole life at once. A woman in a collapsing world carrying a cat she refuses to put down. I had been filing all of it under love without noticing, and the folder was right and I was late.

The Greeks kept separate words for what English mashes together, and I have already spent a whole essay on the map: eros for desire, philia for friendship, storge for the family kind. Agape is the strange one on the list. C.S. Lewis, sorting the four loves in 1960, put it last and called it gift-love: the love that does not depend on the worthiness of its object, that gives because giving is what it does, the way a fire gives heat. The other loves respond to something. You desire the beautiful, you befriend the compatible, you are loyal to your own. Agape is the only one that moves first.

Theologians mostly argue about agape pointed upward, or at humanity in the abstract, and humanity in the abstract has never once needed me to bring it water. The version that interests me is smaller and harder: what happens when the love that moves first gets pointed at a Tuesday, a stranger, a spreadsheet, the way your one life actually went.

Read as one document, my saved folder sorts itself into two piles. The first pile is love aimed the normal way, at a person: the attachment psychology, the question lists, a poem about a farewell that chooses the other person’s ease over its own suffering. The second pile is the same feeling with the person subtracted. Amor fati is love aimed at fate. The Federer clip is love aimed at a stranger, with nothing owed and nothing returned. The Aurelius line is love aimed at the day, rescued from the imagined decades that keep trying to crush it. A line about discipline being the art of not betraying yourself is the love aimed inward. Even the caption that said the calmest people just have better systems belongs in the pile: building the system that catches you is a way of loving a future version of yourself you have not met.

Nobody curates a folder like that on purpose. You save one post at a time, at midnight, for reasons you do not examine. Which is exactly why I trust it as evidence. Read whole, the folder is a constitution my thumb has been drafting one midnight save at a time.

Erich Fromm keeps showing up in these essays and I have stopped apologizing for it. In The Art of Loving he makes the claim this whole page rests on: love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person but “an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole.” And then the sentence with teeth: if I love only one person and am indifferent to everyone and everything else, that is not love but “symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.” The pair bond as a two-person exemption from caring about anything.

I resisted this for a while, because it sounds like it demotes romantic love, and I am not interested in demoting something I want. But Fromm is doing the opposite. He is saying the romance is downstream of the stance. The person who is generous with strangers, patient with the day, faithful to the work, brings that entire trained orientation into the relationship. The person who saved all their love for one future somebody arrives out of shape. You do not practice love on a person. You practice it on everything, and a person is where the practice gets hardest.

Nietzsche’s formula for greatness in a human being was amor fati: “that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it… but love it.” It reads like resignation dressed up, and for years I filed it that way. It is the opposite. Resignation stops wanting. Amor fati keeps wanting at full intensity and aims the wanting at what actually exists. It is the least passive sentence in my whole saved folder.

I am bad with uncertainty. It is the oldest true thing on my jennisms page: not the risk part, the part where you cannot know the shape of what is coming and cannot prepare for it. Loving fate is the only version of preparation that survives that condition. I cannot pre-approve the outcomes. I can decide in advance what my relationship to them will be. Frost’s calf totters; the pasture spring is full of leaves; none of it is under control and all of it gets the same invitation. You come too.

Here is where I have to argue with my own thesis, because agape for everything, taken straight, is a recipe for being eaten alive. I give from fullness; it is one of the things I know about myself. It is also the exact place I can be depleted, because a love that moves first, that never waits for worthiness, has no built-in stopping rule. Agape without a boundary has a name, and the name is people-pleaser.

The folder, it turns out, knew this before I did, the same way it knew everything else. Two posts down from amor fati sits a reel about breaking the people-pleasing loop. Next to it, a psychologist saying nobody has to forgive someone for hijacking their soul. My thumb had saved the antidote alongside the medicine. Agape for everything is a statement about direction, not access: the hand stays open, and I still decide who gets to stand close to it. Lewis said the gift-love gives because giving is what it does. He never said it hands over the whole pasture.