Love in Time - by Fannie Bialek (Paperback)

About the Book

"Love cannot be everlasting, much as we might desire it to be so. So, what is love in a life that begins and ends? How does it feel to love as a finite being, imperfectly as we may? In Western philosophy and religious thought, love has often been characterized as a source of constancy and commitment. Love in Time reveals the opposite to be true. From the ways our beloveds (and their qualities that endear them to us) change over time, to the possibility of our feelings toward our beloveds-or their feelings toward us-changing, love, Bialek shows, is an endeavor fraught with uncertainty. Yet it is that very uncertainty that entices us to our beloveds. Love is not a refuge from the vagaries of worldly life, impervious to its changing conditions. Rather, it is an orientation to a future that we do not yet know. In this book, Fannie Bialek explores the temporal experience of lovers spending time with their beloveds. Love in time, like any temporal experience, is composed of moments of not knowing what will happen next. It is an experience of vulnerability in this way, the lover exposed to an unknown future and waiting to see how it plays out. Attending to these vulnerabilities, Love in Time develops a fresh ethics of love that centers uncertainty and humility. It is an ethics of love that speaks to the uncertainty of the present and beyond"--

Book Synopsis

A meditative reconsideration of what it means to love as ever-changing beings in an ever-changing world.

We live in time, and so we love in time. Our beloveds change, and we change beside them. Sometimes we change apart, but it is this very changeableness, the braving of an unknown future together, that endears us to our lovers. Far from an ideal of constancy and commitment, then, love is an endeavor fraught with uncertainty.

In this book, Fannie Bialek sketches a view of love that does not ignore the vagaries of life but embraces them. In contrast to philosophical and religious attempts to secure love against finitude, Bialek's love embraces its susceptibility to change and accepts the ethical challenges such change introduces. Attentive to our deepest vulnerabilities, Bialek develops a fresh ethics of love grounded by our humility before time.

Review Quotes

"In a meditation at once philosophical and enmeshed in the world, Bialek shows us how we love in time, both desirous of and fearful for the future. Her patient and lucid prose urges us to discard neither the desire nor the fear but to bear with them both as an essential part of being human. In Bialek's hands, love comes to seem the only question."--Emily Ogden, University of Virginia

"In this profound reflection, Bialek argues that to love means to desire more time with the beloved. Yet, time brings uncertainty, decline, and death. Lovers are thus suspended between the desire for more time and the fear of vulnerability that entails. Bialek offers guidance to sustain future possibilities of desire in the context of those fears. Carefully and imaginatively argued, Bialek's work is at once illuminating and practical, remaining always close to the lived realities of lovers in time."--Kathleen Skerrett, University of Richmond

"Time places us inescapably within beginnings and endings. Love, once it begins, wants not to end. Yet somewhere between loving and losing, there is lingering. In a series of artful essays, Bialek invites us to linger with our loves, offering life lessons through the close contemplation of desire. Love in Time restores lyricism to moral inquiry and eloquence to ethics. It demonstrates that we may speak wisely and poetically, even about uncertainty. The results are luminous."--Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., Georgia State University

About the Author

Fannie Bialek is assistant professor of religion and politics at Washington University in St. Louis.