Appendix — Do We Really Love Pizza?
At this point a reasonable objection appears. "All of this sounds thoughtful," someone says, "but I also love pizza." Fair enough.
English is generous with the word love. We love spouses, children, parents, dogs, music, autumn mornings, old books, mountains, chocolate, and pizza. Surely those cannot all be the same phenomenon.
Or can they?
This book has explored one particular kind of love: the kind that grows between lives. Before we leave the subject, it is worth asking how far those patterns travel.
The four movements—and pizza
The book began with seeing, giving, staying, repair. Pizza can survive pieces of the joke: I spend money on it; I share it with people; it has remained through many memorable evenings, mostly because I finished eating it. But pizza has no inner life to see, no shared harm to mend, no self to stay beside when the night goes wrong. Whatever love of pizza is, it is not what we have been watching.
By now you probably see the game. Trust, connection, integration, belonging, freedom—each names something a bond between lives can carry over time. Pizza can flirt with the edges ("I trust my favorite pizza place"; stuffed crust has occasionally negotiated from a position of strength), but the experiment has done its work.
Some people genuinely experience profound attachment toward places, objects, or works of art—reminders that human affection is more varied than ordinary language suggests. Many people love dogs, and most of the patterns survive: dogs have inner lives, surprise us, trust us, and their joy changes our own. Self-love is stranger still, and much of what we explored may apply there too—not merely as metaphor.
Perhaps the problem is not pizza—perhaps the problem is English. The language asks one word to do remarkable work. We love our children, our friends, our hometown, jazz, hiking, pizza. These are clearly not identical experiences, yet neither are they entirely unrelated. There is something common among them—a kind of delight, attachment, appreciation, or care—that the language gathers beneath one small word.
This book has explored one region of that landscape: the love that grows between lives. That is enough work for one book.
So, do we really love pizza? I think we do—just not in the way this book has meant, and perhaps that is all right. Words often carry families of meanings rather than single definitions; we recognize them by resemblance more than precision. Love may be one of those words. I have not solved that mystery; I have only narrowed the question.
If this appendix has accomplished anything, I hope it is this: the next time someone tells you they love pizza, you will probably smile; the next time someone tells you they love another human being, you may notice that something altogether different has entered the room.
Only on Tuesdays.