Loving the alien

A few days ago, I wrote about how difficult it can be to learn about cultures that are unconnected to one's own; how we lack a context in which to understand what we are trying to learn.

Part of my difficulty in this kind of learning is that I tend to approach it purely intellectually, which is perhaps the worst way to approach it; cultures have a primal, earthy core—the smell of food, the words of prayer, the meanings of "papa" and "mama"—that ratiocination is slow to see, if it can see it at all. And without understanding those, what can we really understand?

Perhaps the best way to learn about a different culture is to love that culture, or at least love a person of that culture. Love shows us what reason cannot because love makes obstacles into opportunities. The boring stretches of the Iliad might stop someone reading it out of intellectual curiosity, but to the person reading it to impress a girl in Thessaloniki, those endless lines of boasts become an endless string of jokes, because love can make us laugh like that and help us go on.