Words From the Heart



Heart-shaped biscuits, a hand-made gift from my two years old nephew 

I have always been a dreamer for it is easier to be a dreamer than to be an artist. To be an artist is hard work because one needs to create something out of nothing – links visible only to the eyes of the soul or comprehend something whether it is the art of writing, painting, poetry, cooking, living or loving. The art of living and loving are both intertwined, in which, no matter how hard we try, we become a master too late in life.

 So, on this St. Valentine’s Day, I would let the masters of overflowing lyricism who are quite matchless in their expression of love to educate and enlighten us and at the same time, to console, and be the confidant of our thoughts when our hearts mislead us from time to time or when we want balm for the heart’s aching wounds for their words, I hope, will breathe a beneficent freshness and convey their peaceful sweetness to our soul. This is a purely personal choice about love in various phases and colours. There are statements of loss and regret as well as celebrations.

 ~

Love – I cannot live without it. Oh, I do not mean that I go into a decline, develop odd symptoms, become a caricature. I mean something far more serious than that. I mean that I cannot live well without it. I cannot think or act or speak or write or even dream with any kind of energy in the absence of love. I feel excluded from the living world. I become cold, fish-like, immobile. I implode. My idea of absolute happiness is to sit in a hot garden all day, reading or writing – utterly safe in the knowledge that the person I love will come home to me in the evening…every evening.       

Anita Brookner’s Booker Prize-winning novel, Hotel du Lac (1984)

~

 

Cromyomancy* carves out a preview,

And a foretaste of you:

Brittle as gold-leaf the outer skin,

Firmness within;
Full savour, more piercing than any
 Peach or strawberry;
The heart will grow.
From the beginning, tears flow,
But of no rage or grief:
Wise cromyomancers know
Weeping augurs belief.

Kingsley Amis
(*cromyomancy: divination by means of onions)

 ~


Good morning, Midnight!
I'm coming home.
Day got tired of me -
How could I of him?
Sunshine was a sweet place,
I'd like to stay -
But Morn didn't want me - now -
So good night, Day!


Emily Dickinson


~

If ever any beauty I did see,

Which I desir’d and got, ‘twas but a dream of thee.

John Donne’s The Good Morrow

~

Oh my dear I would like to be something else, anything else, an albatross. In short I wish I never knew you. Or could forget. Or be a bone – you could suck it. Or a stone in the bottom of your pocket, slipped down if you like, though one of the holes in the lining and wedged into the hem more or less forever, until you threw the coat away…

Over by Edna O’Brien, recently published in her collection of short stories, The Love Object (2013). 

~

There were no questions in this time. All was agreeing, answer after answer melting, lapsing into one another: “Yes”; “Yes, darling”; “Yes” – smiling, accepting, kissing, dismissing…No argument, no discussion. No separate character any more to judge, test, learn by degrees. He was like breathing, like the heart beating – unknown, essential, mysterious. He was like the dark…

Well, I know what it is to be in love all right….

The Weather in the Streets by Rosamond Lehmann (I remember reading somewhere that this novel was Dirk Bogarde’s favourite).

 

Letter from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Sophia Hawthorne (5^th December 1839)

 

Dearest, - I wish I had the gift of making rhymes, for methinks there is poetry in my head and heart since I have been in love with you. You are a Poem. Of what sort, then? Epic? Mercy on me, no! A sonnet? No; for that is too laboured and artificial. You are a sort of sweet, simple, gay, pathetic ballad, which Nature is singing, sometimes with tears, sometimes with smiles, and sometimes with intermingled smiles and tears.

Lady Antonia Fraser

Nathaniel Hawthorne quote is taken from “Love Letters: An Anthology chosen by Antonia Fraser” (She dedicated this personal anthology of love to her husband, the playwright, Harold Pinter).

~ 

I've known a hundred kinds of love;

All made the loved one rue...

EMILY BRONTË

 ~

The bonsai on the bench,

Wind-sculpted like memory –

I liked that part.

The path along the river,

And your fingers on my back –

I lived that part.

The quiet of your breathing,

And how you heard your heart -

I loved that part.

 

A Japanese Haiku poem