Hello! My name is Lauren Wallach, and I would like to introduce you to my webtext. I picked the topic of ἀγάπη, or agapē love, which is one of the Ancient Greek distinctions of love. This topic is important to me because agapē love describes the love that humankind feels for one another. I think in this world today, we can all use a little bit more of that kind of love. I also think it is interesting that while in our culture we can recognize and appreciate the feelings of different types of love, we do not have words for these differentiations. Labeling feelings is not everything, but I believe it can be helpful in recognizing our differences, our similarities, and raising up other people’s voices.
For this project, I was most excited to analyze music and to write a couple of haiku poems representing agapē love. Music and musical literacy have always been really important things in my life, and I was looking forward to incorporating that into my formal education. Also, haikus have always been one of my favourite types of poems to read and write – I like the simple structure of them, and that while they only have seventeen syllables total, they can often say so much in such a small space.
The biggest surprise for me during this project was the struggle that I had finding pieces of work and genres that were more specifically about the universal, human kind of love, like the original Greek idea, instead of the more Christian idea of love between God and mankind. Most pieces and genres that I found seemed to embody the more Christian sense of the word, and while that was very interesting in itself and in its own right, I did not want to focus on the love between a God and a man – I instead wanted to highlight the love one human has for another human. To me, this seemed to be the most relevant kind of agapē love for this day and age.
I really hope you enjoy my webtext – this topic means a lot to me, and thus I hope you can take something out of it, whether that is an appreciation for the recognition of finding words for different types of love in other cultures, or simply enjoying the genres and mediums and other ways in which agapē love is expressed here.