mysterious clarity

He achieved that rarest of  things; a heart free of bitterness.

---G. Dyer, on Camus.

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What shape is the human heart, again? Oblong? Must one be outside it to see it clearly?

---after Holub.

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It is said of P. Fitzgerald that she wrote (I like to say 'writes') with a "mysterious clarity". Nothing really happens and maybe nothing is meant to happen. That is life. Instead there is a cool, plane surface of prose on which, now and then, one detects a faint scratch; it is as if a whole world lives in that groove/grove or as if the backdrop to a life is suddenly illuminated by what goes wrong.

~~~

What would it mean to accept the cards one has been dealt, to not think or hope too much that the next twist will deal you an ace? For some, either by choice or temperament, either by ignorance, lack of will or because they've faced terrible circumstances, there will always be a foreboding sense of a deepening darkness. The world is a dark place and when one thinks of the coarse thinking, the violence, and all the hatreds it is not unreasonable to favour withdrawal, quietness, escape. 

~~~

Slowly reading Yourcenar and the question that strikes you again and again-and one that is quite alien to us in many respects-is the one posed by Hans Jonas: how do we go on without a sense of immortality or the timeless?

When one thinks of one's thoughts, words and deeds in the light of eternity one is brought face to face with the reality that much of what we say and do is fragmentary and not worth noting. From a Muslim perspective we are told that the body, too, will bear witness to what it sent forth into the world, that it, too, will be accountable since it is a part of reality and shares responsibility with the soul. Our lusts, our desires, our highest desires...how do these fare with time?

What shape is the heart, again? Were there other rooms there? Some abandoned, like camps in the desert when the travelers have moved on, the structure of the coals and ashes collapsing like the last lines of a poem. A thief, a thief has entered another with the stealth of a fox in the night. You dare not switch on the lights and let the fox tug gently...Everything has its time: the flick of the wrist, the card; the same constellation of the stars comes around again, and the fox's footprints, fresh, deep, and invisible in a heart white as snow.