Love is...?

Love is a many-splendored thing. Love is just a game. In Angel, love is sacrifice. In Buffy (infamously) love isn't brains, children, it's blood - screaming in you to work its will.

Me, I've never really asked myself what love is; love is love, y'know? Then last night, a friend came up with this: 'Love is freedom.' I like that. It somehow encapsulates the joy and the terror of the emotion, all at the same time. You can be who you want, do what you want, but to get there, at some point you have to let go.

So I was just wondering - what else is love?

[Poll #162916]

The Master And Margarita

The book that korovyov_x recommended to me arrived from Amazon this morning - The Master And Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov. Slightly battered in one corner, but I can live with it. I hadn't actually read anything about this book before I ordered it, I just did what I was told, and I haven't had a chance to start reading it yet - but this is what the blurb says:

In this imaginative extravaganza the devil, disguised as a magician, descends upon Moscow in the 1930s with his riotous band, which includes a talking cat and an expert assassin. Together they succeed in comically befuddling a population which denies the devil's existence, even as it is confronted with the diabolic results of a magic act gone wrong.

And here was I thinking the point of the exercise was to expand my horizons and get me to read non-speculative fiction...

Terry Goodkind

There's an interview with Terry Goodkind here (mp3, 1 hour). I've never felt the urge to read one of his books (he writes one of those huge ongoing fantasy sagas that take up whole shelves in bookshops), and after listening to the interview I think it's unlikely that I ever will. On the other hand, it did provide some entertaining soundbites:

6:55 - "The purpose of presenting something in a book is to present normative values, and a normative value shows someone how you should live your life. That's why teenage girls cut their hair like a favourite movie star, why boys dress like their favourite sports figure. They're seeing normative values, and they're imitating it. This ability of human beings to imitate successful behaviour is how they achieve values, how they achieve their goals. So the purpose of a novel, a good novel, should be to present worthwhile values being achieved, and I think that's best accomplished through the use of heroes."

8:50 - "Science fiction as literature is a dead genre. [...] And it wasn't a genre that was killed off by the readers; science fiction is a genre that committed suicide. The thing that I'm going to tell you next, there are examples that will run counter to this, but in general, science fiction as a genre presents a view of mankind as his own worst enemy. It shows him as his own destroyer, as a creature whose own mind is going to be his own doom, and this is anti-life. And people are sick and tired of reading this kind of notion, because what it is is the dark ages view of mankind - as crippled, as ulcerous, as evil, as sinful, as doomed, and his only salvation is in another world. [...] I don't believe mankind is inherently evil."

16:15 - "The war on terrorism is an utter failure to recognise evil - it's an attempt to appease evil. The war on terrorism is a war on a tactic. Imagine in world war II if we'd declared war on poison gas chambers, and we'd said 'look at all these jews dying in poison gas chambers, we have to do stop this, we're going to declare war on poison gas chambers. We're going to find the money of the people who've backed the gas chamber constructors, and we're gonna find the people who imported them and we're going to stop them." In World War II, we rightly declared war on Nazism because it's an evil philosphy that was trying to destroy us. But in this war, we're declaring war on a tactic, like we're saying we're going to outlaw blitzkrieg. Well you can't declare war on a tactic, you must declare war on the philosophy that is using that tactic. And when people are trying to kill us, if we don't respond in the proper way, we will die. If you don't defend yourself, they're not going to pale at the task, they're not going to stop being evil. They're not going to say 'hey, I think we'll stop hating the United States. We're going to let them go and we're not going to try to blow them up and kill them all. Well, they're not going to stop. These are evil people, and unless you realise that there's evil among you and go after it it's going to continue to live and expand among you, and you'll be stuck with it forever. So that's why I'm not subtle when I write about these things."

52:25 - "Ayn Rand is my favourite author; I consider her the greatest philospher since Aristotle."

And now, a logic problem.
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