To have a strong feeling about anything is to discover something about the poles of your own mind, some potent charge reason can’t touch that electrifies life with an energy you don’t fully understand yet can’t and often don’t want to quell.

We learn a great deal about ourselves and the gaps in our self-knowledge through love, but we can learn just as much through hate. In both experiences, the ultimate question and the great test of character is what we do with what we learn.

In a passage from her altogether wonderful novel There Are Rivers in the Sky (public library), Turkish writer Elif Shafak offers a taxonomy of motives for hate:

Hatred is a poison served in three cups. The first is when people despise those they desire — because they want to have them in their possession. It’s all out of hubris! The second is when people loathe those they do not understand. It’s all out of fear! Then there is the third kind — when people hate those they have hurt.

To me, pulsating beneath all three is the same thing that bedevils our troubles with love — the angst of not knowing ourselves: hating in others what we don’t understand in ourselves, hurting others with what we don’t understand in ourselves and hating them for it. But there is a way of orienting to our own electric aversions with courage and curiosity, a way of investigating the subterranean sorrows and longings coursing beneath them, that can transform them into learning tools for living a truer, kinder life.

Shafak writes:

This world is a school and we are its students. Each of us studies something as we pass through. Some people learn love, kindness. Others… abuse and brutality. But the best students are those who acquire generosity and compassion from their encounters with hardship and cruelty. The ones who choose not to inflict their suffering on to others. And what you learn is what you take with you to your grave.

Couple with poet Jane Hirshfield’s wonderful “Spell to Be Said Against Hatred,” then revisit George Saunders on how to love the world more.