For what remained amid his wandering thoughts, the not-quite-truths and daydreamings, was what Henry James called "the strangely accepted finality of relationship", a solid core of love.
The core of "Love & Friendship" is set into motion by the necessity of distinguishing mores from morality and the effort that the distinction involves.
Intriguing debuts, meanwhile, include Simon Barraclough's Los Alamos Mon Amour (Salt) which wheels through forms, moods and locations around a sensual core of love poems and, in April, Adam Foulds's ambitious narrative sequence, The Broken Word (Cape), based on the Mau Mau insurgency against the British colonial administration in 1950s Kenya.
Rantzen was moving on the subject of her late husband Desmond Wilcox and how the pain of loss never goes away, while the mightily intellectual Kane depicted a future in which we'll literally be able to live in each other's heads (what a nightmare), after he'd sung some of "When I Fall In Love" as an example of the "inter-subjectivity" which he said lies at the core of love.
The 8 Habits of Love outlined in my book help us access that core of love and power within each one of us, and then in turn help us release the power of love onto and within others, too.
Although the final dinner scene may seem unearned to some, the ending doesn't discount the utter messiness and pain of their collective process but highlights the family's core of love.
My mom held onto this wild idea that the real gritty sentiment at the core of love, love for the mothers of the world, those who do the work of mothering, and true love itself, should be threaded throughout the days of our weeks, months and years rather than artificially packaged into a day filled with price-fixed brunches and dashed dreams.
But I know of no fellow liberal or gay friend who doesn't think that the core issue is one of loving another person.
