Interstellar Love

One evening several months ago I found myself home alone. I happened to be in a mood—an epic movie kind of mood. Got a little food, turned the lights down and the stereo up, and settled on an old favorite: Interstellar. Everything about this movie is big—cinemaphotography, soundtrack, plot line, philosophy, emotion. So much of the human condition is on display in this drama, and there are a number of scenes that are sunk deep into my soul. Here’s one of them.

 

A conversation comes up between the movie’s two main actors, Coop (played by Matthew McConaughey) and Brand (played by Anne Hathaway). The two of them are having to decide, along with a third shipmate, Romilly (played by David Gyasi), which of two planets they should go to. They have enough fuel to get to only one.  

 

All three of them know that one of the planets had a scientist-explorer, Dr. Wolf Edmunds, previously sent to it. However, Romilly doesn’t know that Brand has an emotional connection with Edmunds. Coop thinks Romilly deserves to know that information. When Romilly calls for a vote, Coop then forces  the truth out of Brand so Romilly can see it. The insight on the nature of love that the conversation draws out is memorable (begins around 1:28:00 in the movie):

 

Coop: Well, if we’re going to vote, there’s something you [Romilly] should know. Brand, he has a right to know.

Brand: That has nothing to do with it.

Romilly: What does?

Coop: She’s in love with Wolf Edmunds.

Romilly: Is that true?

Brand: Yes. And that makes me want to follow my heart. But maybe we’ve spent too long trying to figure all this out with theory.

Coop: You’re a scientist, Brand.

Brand: So listen to me. When I say that love isn’t something that we invented, it’s…it’s observable and powerful. It has to mean something.

Coop: Love has meaning, yes. Social utility, social bonding, child-rearing.

Brand: We love people who have died. Where’s the social utility in that?

Coop: None.

Brand: Maybe it means something more, something we can't yet understand. Maybe it's some evidence, some artifact of a higher dimension that we can't consciously perceive. I am drawn across the universe to someone I haven't seen in a decade who I know is probably dead. Love is the one thing we're capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that even if we can't understand it yet.

 

We do love people who have died. You know that’s true. For me it’s people like my grandmother, my parents, a sister, a roommate, a handful of clients. You also know there’s no social utility in working to maintain that love. Still, we do.

 

Some weeks after watching Interstellar, I began piecemealing my way through a long interview that Lex Fridman had with Neri Oxman. Neri is an Israeli-born American scientist. She earned her PhD at MIT and has won several prestigious awards in her field. In the midst of all the fascinating conversation surrounding Neri’s work, I was not anticipating her citation of a letter written by Albert Einstein to his daughter. Einstein asked his daughter to not publicly reveal for twenty years the contents of what he wrote to her. When she eventually did, here’s part of what he wrote:

 

“When I proposed the theory of relativity, very few understood me, and what I will reveal now to transmit to mankind will also collide with the misunderstanding and prejudice in the world. I ask you to guard the letters as long as necessary, years, decades, until society is advanced enough to accept what I will explain below.

 

“There is an extremely powerful force that, so far, science has not found a formal explanation to. It is a force that includes and governs all others, and is even behind any phenomenon operating in the universe and has not yet been identified by us. This universal force is LOVE.”

 

Neri goes on to share other parts of the letter in which Einstein comments on his famed equation E = mc2 but how he considers love the greater force that shapes the universe. He likens love to forces like gravity and light in love’s power to attract people to each other.

 

Lex then responds by citing the last paragraph of Einstein’s letter to his daughter where he writes, “I deeply regret not having been able to express what is in my heart, which has quietly beaten for you all my life. Maybe it’s too late to apologize, but as time is relative, I need to tell you that I love you and thanks to you I have reached the ultimate answer!”

 

Neri then says, “It is everything. Love is everything. I forget who said this, but, ‘I love my daughter more than evolution required.’ And I feel the same way toward my other half, and I feel that when you find that connection anything and everything is possible.”  

 

Amelia Brand, the fictional scientist, intuits the character of love going beyond a utilitarian end. Neri Oxman, the very real top-rate scientist, discerns the nature of love as exceeding the requirements for the sustaining of basic life forms. But then why? And to what end?

 

I’d like to add an additional thought on love. Love always has a subject. Brand loves Edmunds to the ends of the universe, and if Edmunds knows that it might well help to keep him alive on a very inhospitable planet. Neri loves her daughter and husband more than evolution requires, and I bet the husband and child relish the deep security attached to such intense love. But love also has an object, the one who is doing the loving. Everyone who is loved has a lover.

 

Let me ask, then, what does the love that would go interstellar for you have as its object? Some might say the universe itself, or earth, even. Except you know our universe is cold and heartless. And earth, left to itself, will eat you alive. Because these are such terrifying thoughts, we now have people thinking up the possibility of multiverses in the hopes of increasing the odds, and others calling earth our mother rather than our sister in the hopes of rebirthing. Except there are serious-minded scientist like Neri who, in her interview with Lex, acknowledges the math doesn’t add up that other intelligent life forms exist beyond the little blue marble we inhabit.

 

Which leaves Neri speculating about magic and Lex speculating about aliens. To which I’ll add that interstellar love is one of several reasons why I cannot convert to the atheist faith (though I did take a serious look at it nearly a decade ago during a crisis of faith—and this love is the only thing that kept me from stepping into the abyss). Love that goes beyond evolutionary requirements, curiously enough, is also one of the reasons so many atheists still retain and practice some form of spirituality.

 

But would you then find it any more sensible and satisfying to place the object of love in an ambiguous, subjective, nameless source such as the Divine-in-all-things or the Spirit-that-inhabits-all-life? If so, what justification do we then have for loving anyone more than evolution requires? Where is the objective evidence that guides and compels us to love like this?

 

Let me propose the answer to all of these questions is summed up in Christmas.

 

Love went interstellar. Love embodied. Love suffered. Love bled. Love died. And Love lives again. Beyond anything evolution would require or imagine. Love did this for you. For YOU.

 

Merry Christmas, friends.  

 

Because God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son.