'the slow death of the heart'

For dear anton (thank you so much for pointing me here)...

Ten years without you

For so it happens

Days make their steady progress, a routine

That is merciful and attracts nobody

Already, like a disciplined scholar,

I piece fragments together, past conjecture

Establishing true sequences of pain;

For so it is proper to find value

In a bleak skill...

--G. Hill.

Somewhere in the heaven

Of lost futures

The lives we might have lived

Have found their fulfilment.

---Derek Mahon.

the fierceness of the heart, the afternoon shadows taking root in the earth. the slowness of your hands. memory haunted by things that did not come to pass; the gaze quiet and passive, like a low-flame, loosely centred on itself, toppling over its axis. the mind. focused. on what holds it together. words painstakingly recalled, as when one bites one's tongue. lost in thought.

there was something quite extraordinary about this novel. not the style or sharp insights. in fact, the first seventy pages or so seemed pedestrian and strangely lacking in these qualities. the life of a university professor is, after all, quite dull. what light can be shone on such a narrow range of human experience?(and you gave up reading Exley at exactly the same point). but there was a line or two at the beginning, quite oblique, understated, that kept you going. (what is that line that keeps us going, only God knows). And throughout there was the sense of distance, of looking at a life (his, our own) that was one step removed, not in an abstract or detached sense but, well, mystical in a way.

and perhaps that's what fascinated you, for isn't that precisely what the life of a teacher is? one full of masks, of deception? this figure, behind the stage, you see a glimpse of him/her now and then and find it is impossible to imagine the life that goes on within, or the life that continues beyond the solid walls of the classroom. and the teacher, acutely aware of his own contradictions, of the divisions in his soul (or, more accurately, of the particular way in which his soul is divided).

the university as a refuge from the world, from contingency and, you hope, from time itself. a kind of innocence that you think only monks or ascetics can have. but his life is often narrow, and small, in no way great. it doesn't open up to anything grand or memorable (unlike the monastic's that is open to the divine and that inscribes itself in second spaces). the life of the mind, riddled by pettiness and small-time politics. but even at best, even if free from these distractions, still at war with "life".

autonomy, for sure, but what is freedom unless it makes connections, unless the eye finally understands what the hand did? only you grow old. uniquely. providing much material for reflection. each year there's a fresh start, it goes on and on, until you are a witness to it no more. this accumulation of names, one replacing the other, until it doesn't matter. the name that names least is the name.

colleagues come and go. it is hard to explain to the newer ones. it is not a matter of forgetfulness. cynicism and indifference eats up some. but that's to be expected. happens everywhere. the snow is general. why do you complain?

what was true, then? not the formulations of the the unmoored mind or the laughter you shared in-between. there's no clown like a serious clown. what is real, then? only this: yearning makes the heart grow deeper.