There is an awful warmth about my heart
like a load of immortality.
John Keats, "Letters"
Controlling one's heart is as easy as cutting granite with a razor, or mooring a ship with a single silken thread.
John Henry Newman, "Letters"
I remember my mother hanging clothes in winter light. It was Valentine's Day, and tiny icicles had formed on the wooden clothes pins that held my father's stiff work shirts to the frozen line. I stayed home sick from school, though the evening before I methodically had prepared the small red hearts I planned to distribute to a few favorite girls among my sixth-grade classmates. But Eros does not always hit his mark, and, with the help of some fortuitous microbes, I spent the day with my mother: a day filled with the smells of hot chocolate and a baking cake.
I remember sitting in the kitchen staring out at the frozen wash hanging on the line. I remember thinking how appropriate it is that Valentine's Day, the feast of warm hearts, comes in the coldest month of the year. By February, winter has come in earnest, revealing the skeleton of things. Sparrows put on plain brown overcoats. We are all in great need of warmth, the way a walk in the basement requires light.
The soul experiences winter as much as the body. The falling temperatures only make it worse. A winter in the soul too often dwells on the monotony in affection. It sometimes leads to an indifference in the expression of kindness toward those with whom we are most intimate. Love should open the heart like a rose. In the soul's winter, it closes it like a cabbage. This is why we have Valentine's Day. To remind us that the heart has many hiding places. It also has doors. In winter too many of them are bolted shut. Valentine's Day reminds us to keep at least one door ajar. The right person may happen along, or maybe a thief. Valentine's Day convinces us that, either way, it is worth taking the chance.
Isadora Duncan called the heart a pastime and a tragedy. Flaubert spoke of the heart as a cemetery: we carry the departed around in our hearts. But the dearly departed include more than the dead. The heart also contains those former loves we have tried to ignore, but never quite manage to forget. Those lost loves live secretly in some of the heart's locked rooms. Sometimes, like a persistent burglar, they manage to pick these locks in our dreams.
Lost loves are an important part of the economy of the heart, unless the heart makes a stone of itself. Lost loves must find their place, or the beating of the heart begins to sound too much like an empty steel drum, or a dried nut rattling around in its dusty shell.
In the heart there is always a kind of order, a regularity of inner forces, binding the possessors by different ties to different loves, living and dead, found and lost. These ties all have their consequences; the most important one is that they make us the people we have become.
When I memorized a cherished poem as a child, my maternal grandmother called the process "learning by heart." It is not the brain, nor the mind that remembers certain things. It is the heart. And it is the heart that traces every line of my wife's face when she is away. It is the heart that regularly allows her to display a curious kind of active imagination when it comes to my virtues. This is because the heart is a gentle, tender prison. To avoid solitary confinement, love magnifies both its object and its subject.
Blaise Pascal suggests in his "Pensees" that sometimes the heart has reasons that the mind will never know. That is why it is the heart alone that understands what is perhaps the greatest of love's many paradoxes: When the heart is empty, it soon becomes too small to be inhabited by even the most ardent of visitors. But when the heart is crowded, it always manages to find more room.
Stephen Vicchio teaches philosophy at the College of Notre Dame.