SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR

The relative lack of philosophical work about love is truly strange, because it's obvious that our usual ways of talking about love are subject to serious confusion. Consider the two most popular ways to talk about love: as an absolute certainty or as an unknowable mystery. Both descriptions at least agree that love is something singular and perhaps unreal, since neither godlike certainty nor enigmatic vastness are otherwise part of the human experience.

The 'certainty' model and the 'mystery' model have another unfortunate similarity: they do not explain any of the ethical implications of love — what do we owe those we love, what can we rightfully ask from those who declare their love for us, and what (if anything) is allowed to change about love when the lovers inevitably change?

In this much-needed new book, Fannie Bialek offers an ethical account of these high-stakes questions in relentlessly humanistic terms. A lover is someone who desires someone else. Love happens in the tension between an open-ended desire, a curious vulnerability which wants to see how the unknown story will unfold — and time's gradual revelation of the actual story, which becomes specific, develops patterns and limits, and comes to an end.

Rather than turning away from this tension, or explaining it away with abstractions, Bialek follows Kierkegaard in addressing her work to the "living, existing human being" who is moved by real desires and afflicted with particular anxieties. Here, love is not something that floats above human life but which exists in specific desires and forms of attention, in the particular things we know and don't know, and even in the un-wished-for ways that love changes in time.

In addition to being a rising star in ethical philosophy, Fannie is a dear friend, a patron of the shop for many years, and a primary motivation behind our extensive book department. Not too many people encouraged us to sell philosophy books (it's a bit of an odd choice for an art supply store), but Fannie would always come in and talk about Hegel with us. Today we're proud to be fast-growing booksellers because of passionate people like her.

All our copies of Love in Time are signed by the author. Thanks, Fannie!

FROM THE PUBLISHER:

Love in Time is a meditative reconsideration of what it means to love as ever-changing beings in an ever-changing world.

We live in time, and so we love in time. Our beloveds change, and we change beside them. Sometimes we change apart, but it is this very changeableness, the braving of an unknown future together, that endears us to our lovers. Far from an ideal of constancy and commitment, then, love is an endeavor fraught with uncertainty.

In this book, Fannie Bialek sketches a view of love that does not ignore the vagaries of life but embraces them. In contrast to philosophical and religious attempts to secure love against finitude, Bialek’s love embraces its susceptibility to change and accepts the ethical challenges such change introduces. Attentive to our deepest vulnerabilities, Bialek develops a fresh ethics of love grounded by our humility before time.

PRAISE FOR LOVE IN TIME:

"Bialek's patient and lucid prose urges us to discard neither the desire nor the fear but to bear with them both as an essential part of being human." Emily Ogden, University of Virginia

"Love in Time restores lyricism to moral inquiry and eloquence to ethics. It demonstrates that we may speak wisely and poetically, even about uncertainty."  Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., Georgia State University