"The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular,
difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into
being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of
that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what
humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience
pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through
this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has
come out of this, literature has come out of it. We should think of our
humanity as a privilege."
"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 ...
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