No living being is without interior liquid motion we

swirling and whirling. No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn
inside.
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 the road, the words I have something to tell you , a cat with a broken
spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother’s papery ancient
hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning
echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.

2/18/2020 The American Scholar: Joyas Voladoras - <a href=''>Brian Doyle</a>
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Permission required for reprinting, reproducing, or other uses.
Brian Doyle () , an essayist and
novelist, died on May 27, 2017. To read Epiphanies, his longtime blog for the Scholar ,
please go here. ()
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