“So much held in a heart
in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are
utterly open with no one, in the end—not mother and father, not wife or
husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live
alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to
be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there
will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we
know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and
scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of
character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the
defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart
as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and
down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple
breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words 'I have something to tell
you,' a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the
brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the
memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen
where he is making pancakes for his children.”—
Spiritual
author-editor Brian Doyle (1956-2017), One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder for the Spiritual and Nonspiritual Alike (2019)
I took the image
accompanying this post in July 2013 at Lake Chautauqua, in upstate New York. I
think it conveys something of the sense of loneliness and wonder that the late
Brian Doyle was expressing here.
“It is well for the heart to be naive and for the
mind not to be.”—French novelist and Nobel laureate Anatole France (1844-1924), The Literary Life (1888-1892)
