My mother's Love knew no bounds when it came to my father's care. She nursed him for many years until his death. When I returned to the home where he no longer lived, she handed me a sheaf of handwritten papers that described the week leading up to his death: ‘Suddenly, a profound silence. I hugged him again and again and again. How much I Loved him.’ Her diary of this final week is remarkable for the unlimited and tender care with which she eased his passing, but perhaps more so for the way that her Love appears on the page as both a noun and as a verb. Love worked through her, but it was also a practice, an action that was done and perfected through her many years of care for him, through her decades as a nurse and as a mother to my siblings and me. It is this distinction between Love as something that exists beyond us and as something that we act out that makes Love so difficult to conceptualize. This dual meaning of Love means that our grammar is inadequate to speak about it and that we are often talking of different things when we refer to ‘Love’. However, Love is fundamental to almost everything that we do in the world, so this inadequacy of our usual conceptualization of Love will be addressed in Chapter 1. First, I will address what we mean by the Enlightenment and map out how the rest of the book will suggest that we might want to recover from it.

The Enlightenment can loosely be described as the emergence of European scientific rationality since the 1600s. It is the ongoing attempt to define and describe everything and often results in the disposal of anything that cannot be described. It has been expressed in: the loss of the divine right of kings in the 1600s; the standardization of weights and measures in the 1700s; the harnessing of ever more powerful forces, from steam to atomic power; and even recent attempts to quantify our attention for use and sale by companies like Facebook. While this process has created an increasingly complex and measurable understanding of the natural world, it has also hastened the destruction of the natural systems that we all rely on.