A Book About Love

Author: Jonah Lehrer

I read Jonah Lehrer’s book titled “Imagine” in 2012 and loved it. I and everybody in the world soon came to know that Jonah had made some serious mistakes in this book. A journalist from Brooklyn figured out that Jonah had made up some quotes from Bob Dylan and within a matter of days, he was publicly shamed by all of his peers.  His book, Imagine, was pulled from all bookstores. I had read the book from the library, and desperately wanted to get my own copy, as I still liked the book. Thankfully, it was not hard to find one on eBay and I quickly ordered it for myself.

I didn’t realize how badly Jonah was doing until I read “So you’ve been shamed” by Jon Ronson. Through this book, I also learned that Jonah was writing another book and I was eager to get my hands on it. I checked out the reviews, and was pained to see that the New York Time, Guardian, etc. all had panned the new book. Nevertheless, I wanted to see what it was like for myself and checked out a copy from my local library.

Jonah opens with a note on how he has taken every precaution possible to make sure that he has the right quotes this time. And there are numerous memorable quotes in the book like the one from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet — “Oh, that I were a glove upon that hand, / That I might touch that cheek!”,

The book is filled with plenty of anecdotes on different aspects of love and attachment. Jonah rolls through many experiments that seek to understand the parent-child attachment. He concludes the obvious, that there is no substitute for spending quality time with your kids. You can’t write them letters or have long conversations with them, so the only thing that works is playing with them, touching them, singing to them, etc.

Moving on to adulthood, he tackles marriage by recalling Darwin’s own admission that marriage would curtail his freedom and ability to travel the world and make important discoveries. Despite all of this warning, Darwin got married to Emma Wedgwood and she ended up helping him by reading his drafts and providing valuable feedback. They read books to each other and watched earthworms play in the dirt!

Jonah briefly takes on religion and our “love” for God. He doesn’t go into any depth here, nor does he offer up his own opinion and we are left with “you either know Him or you don’t”.  One place where Jonah spends a good deal of time on is the Grant Study that conducted a bunch of medical and psychiatric tests on 268 Harvard students from the class of 1939 and followed them for the rest of their life. These were some of the most privileged and fortunate men, and the striking thing was that they didn’t end up with the “happily ever after” ending that you would expect. George Vaillant spent a good chunk of his life studying these individuals and he wrote that even the ones who ended up wealthy, had their “full share of difficulty and private despair.” He concluded that “Happiness equals love. Full stop”.

I felt that Jonah saved the best for last, with the story about Frankl, the psychiatrist in Vienna who survives the horrors at Auschwitz and writes about it later. I loved the quote from Frankl, saying that "life can be pulled by goals as sure as it can be pushed by drives.” It is quite impressive to read how Frankl found purpose all through his life. The love for his wife Tilly, helped him survive the horrors he experienced in the concentration camp and after he got out, his purpose was to write the book that was stolen from him. If there is one strong conclusion that will remain with me, it is immortalized in this quote from Nietzsche: "He who has the why to live can bear with almost any how".