Not that long ago Julia Galef put out a call on twitter for good, intellectually honest, texts about love. I’ve thought about that since, and now that the latest ACX postwas also about love, it sparked my interest to finally write some of my own thoughts on it.

And my own thoughts are that there needs to be more of it. Same as with the EA Forum Fiction writing contest; that’s exactly the type of thing we need more of. The Unweaving of a Beautiful Thing is a great story about love for humanity. I’m not really in any way knowledgeable about love, but I read a lot so I figure I can use that to draw inspiration for some good, intellectually honest writing on love.

The marriage speech in Anathem struck me as a good starting point for this. I don’t know if it’s reproduced in full anywhere on the internet (it didn’t turn up for me after a quick google search), but I will provide it at the end of this post. That speech is actually quite short, so I guess this would only be useful as one among many different texts. What this post is mainly for, however, is my own little speech I made that is based off of the Anathem one. In many places it is changed a little, and in some places it is changed a lot. Enjoy

  • Allow me to humble myself for a second, and take on all of the religions of the world as my partner and adversary in this speech. In their texts I clearly see the traces left, thousands of years ago, when their progenitors hit on an insight and a way of expressing it that, for that moment, were true. As when the parts of a clock tick into alignment, and a pin falls into a slot, and something happens: a gate swings open, and through it, a glimpse of a possibility. Those who were there when that gate opened, knew it for a real insight, wrote it down, made it part of their religion - which is a way of saying that they did all that was in their power to pass it on to the ones they loved. Science works in many similar ways. There’s an alignment, a possibility, and you try to pass it on. So does love. Alignment, possibility, expression.

  • It is a tired cliche by this point that knowledge reduces the beauty of the world. It does not. I am not here to debate that, as I imagine that you who are here might already feel similar to me; that the more I know of the complexity of the mind, and the cosmos within which it is inextricably bound up, the more inclined I am to see it as a kind of miracle - not in the religious sense, but rather that the evolution of our minds from bits of inanimate matter was more beautiful and more extraordinary than any of the miracles cataloged down through the ages by the religions of our world.

  • We are all of us, in our ways, trying to understand that miracle. Some zoom out and look at the broad picture. Others zoom in, and try to understand very specific things. Some do it for the love they bear others. Some do it for the love they bear the work. In all cases, trying to understand that miracle is a great and gradual undertaking that encompasses many smaller but no less beautiful undertakings - such as the union of [name] and [name].