Barnes. Pdf

radio and die or We must remember to defrost the fridge and die. Auden was rightly suspicious of his own rhetoric; but to say 
that the line We must love one another or die is untrue because we die anyway (or because those who do not love do not 
instantly expire) is to take a narrow or forgetful view. There are equally logical, and more persuasive, ways of reading the or 
line. The first, obvious one is this: we must love one another because if we don't we are liable to end up killing one another. 
The second is: we must love one another because if we don't, if love doesn't fuel our lives, then we might as well be dead. This, 
surely, is no `damned lie', to claim that those who get their deepest satisfactions from other things are living empty lives, are 
posturing crabs who swagger the sea-bed in borrowed shells. 
This is difficult territory. We must be precise, and we mustn't become sentimental. If we are to oppose love to such wily, 
muscled concepts as power, money, history and death, then we mustn't retreat into self-celebration or snobby vagueness. 
Love's enemies profit from its unspecific claims, its grand capacity for isolationism. So where do we start? Love may or may 
not produce happiness; whether or not it does in the end, its primary effect is to energize. Have you ever talked so well, needed 
less sleep, returned to sex so eagerly, as when you were 
[p. 234]

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J
ULIAN 
B
ARNES
: A History of the World in 10 ½
 
Chapters 
74
ñrst in love? The anaemic begin to glow, while the normally healthy become intolerable. Next, it gives spine-stretching 
confidence. You feel you are standing up straight for the first time in your life; you can do anything while this feeling lasts, 
you can take on the world. (Shall we make this distinction: that love enhances the confidence, whereas sexual conquest merely 
develops the ego?) Then again, it gives clarity of vision: it's a windscreen wiper across the eyeball. Have you ever seen things 
so clearly as when you were first in love? 
If we look at nature, do we see where love comes in? Not really. There are occasional species which apparently mate for 
life (though imagine the opportunities for adultery on all those long-distance migratory swims and night flights); but on the 
whole we see merely the exercise of power, dominance and sexual convenience. The feminist and the chauvinist interpret 
Nature differently. The feminist looks for examples of disinterested behaviour in the animal kingdom, sees the male here and 
there performing tasks which in human society might be characterized as `female'. Consider the king penguin: the male is the 
one that incubates the egg, carrying it around on its feet and protecting it for months from the Antarctic weather with a fold of 
its lower belly ... Yeah, replies the chauvinist, and what about the bull elephant seal? Just lies about on the beach all day and 
fucks every female in sight. It does regrettably seem true that the seal’s behaviour is more standard than that of the male 
penguin. And knowing my sex as I do, I'm inclined to doubt the latter's motivation. The male penguin might just have 
calculated that if you're stuck in the Antarctic for years on end then the cleverest thing to do is stay at home minding the egg 
while you send the female off to catch fish in the freezing waters. He might just have worked things out to his own 
convenience. 
So where does love come in? It's not strictly necessary, is it? We can build dams, like the beaver, without love. We can 
organize complex societies, like the bee, without love. We can travel long distances, like the albatross, without love. We can 
put our head in the sand, like the ostrich, without love. We can die out as a species, like the dodo, without love. 
[p. 235]
Is it a useful mutation that helps the race survive? I can't see it. Was love implanted, for instance, so that warriors would 
fight harder for their lives, bearing deep inside them the candlelit memory of the domestic hearth? Hardly: the history of the 
world teaches us that it is the new form of arrowhead, the canny general, the full stomach and the prospect of plunder that are 
the decisive factors in war, rather than sentimental minds drooling about home. 
Then is love some luxury that sprang up in peaceful times, like quilt-making? Something pleasant, complex, but 
inessential? A random development, culturally reinforced, which just happens to be love rather than something else? I 
sometimes think so. There was once a tribe of Indians in the far north-west of the United States (I'm not inventing them), who 
lived an extraordinarily easy life. They were protected from enemies by their isolation and the land they cultivated was 
boundlessly fertile. They only had to drop a wizened bean over their shoulders for a plant to spurt from the ground and rain 
pods at them. They were healthy, content, and had failed to develop any taste for internecine warfare. As a result, they had a lot 
of time on their hands. No doubt they excelled at things in which indolent societies specialize; no doubt their basketwork 
became rococo, their erotic skills more gymnastical, their use of crushed leaves to induce stupefying trances increasingly 
efficient. We don't know about such aspects of their lives, but we do know what was the main pursuit of their generous leisure 
hours. They stole from one another. That's what they liked to do, and that's what they celebrated. As they staggered out of their 
tepees and another faultless day came smooching in from the Pacific, they would sniff the honeyed air and ask one another 
what they'd got up to the previous night. The answer would be a shy confession - or smug boast - of theft. Old Redface had his 
blanket pilfered again by Little Grey Wolf. Well, did you ever? He's coming along, that Little Grey Wolf. And what did you 
get up to? Me? Oh, I just snitched the eyebrows from the top of the totem-pole. Oh, not that one again. Bo-ring. 
Is this how we should think of love? Our love doesn't help us 
[p. 236]
survive, any more than did the Indians' thieving. Yet it gives us our individuality, our purpose. Take away their joyful larcenies 
and those Indians would be able to define themselves less easily. So is it just a rogue mutation? We don't need it for the 
expansion of our race; indeed, it's inimical to orderly civilization. Sexual desire would be much easier if we didn't have to 
worry about love. Marriage would be more straightforward - and perhaps most lasting - if we were not itchy for love, exultant 
on its arrival, fearful of its departure. 
If we look at the history of the world, it seems surprising that love is included. It's an excrescence, a monstrosity, some 
tardy addition to the agenda. It reminds me of those half-houses which according to normal criteria of map reading shouldn't 
exist. The other week I went to this North American address: 2041 ½ Yonge Street. The owner of 2041 must at some point 
have sold off a little plot, and this half-numbered, half-acknowledged house was put up. And yet people can live in it quite 
comfortably, people call it home ... Tertullian said of Christian belief that it was true because it was impossible. Perhaps love is 
essential because it's unnecessary. 
She is the centre of my world. The Armenians believed that Ararat was the centre of the world; but the mountain was 
divided between three great empires, and the Armenians ended up with none of it, so I shan't continue this comparison. 1 love