Love's Work

January 1, 1996
In a memoir by turns brilliant and exasperating, Rose, who teaches philosophy in England, travels between the adjoining territories of love and death after being diagnosed with-and receiving brutal and ambiguously effective treatment for-abdominal cancer. ``Keep your mind in hell, and despair not,'' she admonishes herself, rejecting both the uncertain certainties of traditional medicine and the sterile idealism of New Age healing. Instead, she puts her shoulder to the wheel of ``love's work,'' getting down in the muck of mortal experience rather than straining futilely to rise above it. Along the way, Rose discusses such worldly subjects as growing up with dyslexia and divorce, finding relief from deadening school lessons in Plato and Pascal and sharing a bed with a Catholic priest. She doesn't wear her extravagant learning lightly (Greek- and German-studded passages and the constant reaching for aphorism may alarm the uninitiated), but her unusual love story rewards the labor it demands. It cuts to the quick.