A Natural History of Love

  In the new Hall of Human Biology and Evolution, one diorama in particular haunts me, and I know I will often be returning to it: a full-size, startlingly lifelike “Lucy” and her mate as she must have looked walking upright across Ethiopia three million years ago. Based on scientific fact and educated guesswork, these models are deeply evocative. Our earliest prehuman relatives (Australopithecus afarensis), they had lower IQs than we have, but were very human in stance, movements, and basic emotions. Standing about three-and-a half-feet tall, weighing sixty pounds or so, Lucy apparently suffered from arthritis and died in her twenties. Her slender fingers and toes curved more than ours, and she had more body hair than modern women do, but she traveled by foot through the forests and plains. Her friends and relatives would be with her, and a special male friend with whom she dines and loves; she holds their child in her arms. She needs the male for food, protection, and something unsayable—perhaps the feeling of peace and wholeness she knows when they lie together in the tall grass. She would be jealous of other females, possessive about her male, and yet find other males appealing. Occasionally, she might be tempted to sneak off with one for a dangerous liaison. In a few years, she and her male might break up and start second families. But that emotional cataclysm would be the farthest thing from her mind as she travels with her lover.

  A volcanic eruption, shown in the background, is coating the landscape with white ash; and as they walk through the savanna, they leave a trail of footprints. Lucy’s head is turned left, her mouth open. She seems startled by us. She does not know what she will become. Looking forward as he walks, her mate has his arm around her shoulder in a familiar gesture of tenderness. She doesn’t know about dinner dates, Valentine’s Day, custody battles. What was their courtship like? What worries them? Do they imagine a future? What delights their senses? How do they comfort their young? I long to meet them face-to-face, to reach through time and touch them. It is like recognizing one’s kin across the street in a bustling city.

  Since then, a long caravan of humans has evolved from love to love. Men have always been described by basic words, pure as minerals. (Man is a Germanic word that simply means “man.”) But words for women suggest more about love. In ancient days, the word for woman—hlaefdige—meant “kneader of bread,” and also mistress of the household, bread maker: lady. In Latin, she was the shaper of loaves, identified with the word fingere, from which we get feign, fiction, figment. Both women and fiction stroll down the same etymological road, back to dhoigho-, a wall that was made of clay or mud bricks; it is also one derivation of the word “paradise.” A woman kneads the bread of the family, shaping it, warming it, combining the ingredients of different personalities. From her doughy body, she bears them; with her stubborn hands she forms them; in the oven of her love, she binds them together. Her task is nothing less than the creation of paradise.

  Lucy does not know this, as she drinks in the hot sun of the plains. The dry grass smells musty, and a breeze cuts through it like an invisible scythe. Birds call from a distant stand of trees, and cicadas scrape song from their legs. Flies pester the baby clinging to her breast, and she brushes them away from its face with her hand. The baby smiles and she smiles back. Her mate stretches out his arms to carry the baby for a spell, and it scrambles onto his shoulder and wraps an arm around his neck. Clouds mix overhead, changing shape and color. One of them reminds him of Lucy’s face, and he laughs. She looks quizzically at him, and he playfully touches her cheek. It is a serene moment for both of them, just to be alive and together. Is what they feel love? Some version of it. Our treasury of emotions, even the most delicate, evolved from their wealth of experiences. We are their heirs. Only two of them walk across this museum exhibit, but that’s enough to give a sense of love’s lineage.

  If a museum’s purpose is to be an accumulation, then it can only fail. But if its purpose is to give a sense of family and neighborhood, then it will succeed by being incomplete. There will be sections straight as a narrative, all sorts of portraits, histories, and souvenirs, and many curios. Studied separately, they will fascinate; and, taken together, they will give a small sense of the vast mosaic. In the jargon of space-faring people (as we now are), natural history museums offer us a contingency sample of life on earth.

  In that sense, the heart is just such a museum, filled with the exhibits of a lifetime’s loves. We remember them frozen in time, illuminated by distance, rinsed in the most unnatural light at times, the better to reveal their finer points. Can they breathe and embrace us? No. But neither can they threaten and wound us, if they’re restrained by glass. They are commemorative. The heart issues them like emotional stamps. They are emblematic. Ransack the museum of your heart for love-sappiness, and you’ll find it for sure, just the right example. My mother once told me how, when she was a teenager, she was so in love with a certain boy that she secretly picked up the Popsicle sticks he tossed away and kept them under her pillow, kissing them at night. To this day, she remembers that as a perfect specimen of girlish infatuation. That same boy, now in his late seventies, bumped into her brother recently and asked tenderly about her. He hasn’t forgotten her, either. The heart is a living museum. In each of its galleries, no matter how narrow or dimly lit, preserved forever like wondrous diatoms, are our moments of loving and being loved.

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