There is a spider crawling along the matted floor of the room where I sit (not the one which has been so well allegorised in the admirable Little Girl's own story): I look upon it with a feeling of dislike, not to say disgust.

It reminds me of the days of childish superstition, which associated spiders with 'the Evil One.' But I am older now, and I know better.

Yet I cannot help it. The repulsive feeling remains. And this, I think, is a key to the nature of hatred.


It is a strange truth that the most constant and active of our feelings is the pleasure we take in hating. The love of life, of liberty, of truth, of our friends — these are fitful and uncertain. But the love of hating — that is a passion which never dies, which never sleeps, which wakes with us in the morning and lies down with us at night.


Nature seems (the more we look into it) made up of antipathies: without something to hate, we should lose the very spring of thought and action. Life would turn to a stagnant pool, were it not ruffled by the jarring interests, the unruly passions, of men.


The white streak in our own fortunes is brightened (or just made visible) by the black clouds that surround it. It is not the good we enjoy that makes us happy, so much as the evil from which we have escaped. We compare, and we are thankful. We contrast, and we are proud.


So it is that the pleasure of hating is, after all, but a perverse form of the love of life. We hate because we care. We hate because we are too deeply invested in the world to be indifferent to it. And the hatred itself — bitter, gnawing, unshakeable — is a kind of testimony to our own existence.


I confess, I am not a philosopher in this matter. I feel the pleasure of hating as keenly as any man. When I read the papers, when I walk the streets, when I sit among my acquaintances, I am filled with a quiet, steady, unutterable sense of opposition. It is not that I wish them ill. It is that I wish them to be wrong — so that I may be right. It is a small, mean feeling, no doubt. But it is real.


And this, I suspect, is the great secret of society. We do not love one another. We tolerate one another. We need one another — to hate. Without the object of our hatred, what would become of us? We would have to look inward, and that is a prospect more terrifying than any enemy.


Let them hate, so long as they fear. No — that is not right. Let them hate, so long as they make us feel alive. There is something almost grateful in the way we cling to our antipathies. They are the landmarks of our moral world. Without them, we would be lost at sea.


I think, sometimes, of the people I have hated most in my life. And I smile. Not because the hatred is gone, but because it is still there, warm and familiar, like an old coat that I have worn for years. It has become a part of me. I would not know myself without it.


Such is the pleasure of hating.

And I confess, I have enjoyed writing this essay.