A Letter to Mr Gabriel Morgan
Gabriel,
I should be sleeping rather than writing you a letter, but I am ill and restless, and we are docked; thus, with the last of the paper that I have brought to zee, I write.
In my last letter--I hope that it has reached you safely--I said that I had gone to zee in order to know myself better and to learn, from a studied distance, what traits and habits of thought I have adopted without realising. Because my illness renders me useless for the work of the zailor, I have turned my efforts instead to this more important work, and I have been questioning what should be the relationship between the head and the heart. (Forgive my handwriting; my hands shake terribly.)
In my youth, like most boys who have recieived a Classical education, and some training in philosophies, I was taught to treat the head and the heart (or, as some might put it, the mind and the body) as separate entities, the formermost always superior to the lattermost. This is, I think, a habit of thought that has been spelt out most explicitly in the philosophies of the last century, from which era of Reason we are apt to derive our notions of Truth--but, further, the theologies of Christian sects have encouraged men of faith to put their wants aside and instead to contemplate God with what we might call a pure hjerte heart. I say this as a kind of preface, or pre-amble, to the meditations that I am undertaking on the question of the heart.
As a boy, who had known no particular sorrow--I say no particular sorrow, for although my mother died when I was three years of age, I did not remember her well enough to greieve very much for her--I understood this separation that my teachers called a fact, only as a theory. Indeed, until I was twenty-four (a year and a half ago; I wish to present you with an exact account), I do not think that I experienced a moment when my mind and my heart were not in perfect accord, although seldom was I encouraged to express more vigourous passions; this injunction did not discomfort me, for such passions struck me very seldom, and not at all in public places. What anger or love I felt at for my brother or my sister, I could express at once, completely, in words native to me. I say native words, not only because I was in those days speaking only in my mother-tongue, but because [an inkblot here, as though the pen had rested long while the writer sat in thought] I did not have to think in order to locate the words that I meant, and I could be assured that, whether or not my brother and sister agreed with me, they at once apprehended my meaning. This feeling of ease, and of inmediate understanding, is what I will call the accord between my heart and my head. I do not mean to say that what I said and what I knew to be true were always in accord, for my brother and I were often confederates against our father; never-the-less, I think that in those days my heart was what might be called pure, for I could not imagine that its contents were dangerous, or that they might be impossible to express.
These are the two problems, I think, of the divide between the mind and the heart, and I cannot resolve them, try though I will: 1) That the mind, sensible of the heart's aeffects on the hearts of others and cautious of the heart's vulnerability, seeks both to shield the heart from harm and to prevent it from doing harm; and 2) That the mind, though it might understand the heart perfectly, is nonetheless incapable of framing the heart's feelings in a way that can be communicated to others. I will not say that I began to divide my mind from my heart when I went to Germany for study, but I think that it was in Germany that I learnt the feeling of it, for I often found that my German was insufficient to the task of speaking my sentiments clearly and exactly. At the time I gained the reputation of which I spoke in my last letter, which was that of a circumspect man, who did not speak rashly--for I could not speak rashly; I could not find the words quickly enough to be rash. I learnt to hold my tongue, not from modesty or shiness, but from my sense of my own ignorance of the words that might not only express my feeling but also make it understood.
When I was twenty-four, though, and just shy of twenty-five, my father died, soon followed by my dearest friend; the cities were full of fever, and my brother said that a great many died swiftly and with little warning. My father, who taught me before all others to be a rational man, was careful to make his will and testement current, and to have it witnessed and authorised, so that his children would not want in his absence; my friend left me nothing, not even a fare-well, he was so young and I did not arrive until he was dead. [another inkblot] As I have said, until then I had known no great griefs, and at once I had lost two men whom I loved above all others. For the first time, I will say, I did not know what I felt, or whether I felt, or what it was to feel. My mind, which could comprehend grief in theory, knew what gestures might make grief understood generally, and I think I shed tears, wore black, and held my sister in her tears and shaking. These are the things that grieving men do, are they not? But I do not think I did them from a pure-hearted sense of my own grief, but instead, from a desire to make comprehensible my feelings by dressing them in mourning garb. It was as though my heart had begun to speak in another language, of which I knew only a little, and so I could not say what it pled for although it pled with great expression and tenderness.
[An inkblot almost the size of a man's thumbnail follows this paragraph.]
I have related to you already the circumstances of my sister's madness, and thus I need not repeat the particulars. It pertains only to say, that whereas in my grief I did not know the words for my feelings, in my horror I began to dread that my feelings were themselves a danger, and thus I supprest them with great care and rigour, but howsoever I tried, I could not entirely subdue them--and indeed, like a supprest spring, they uncoiled with still greater vigour when I loosened my grip for a moment. I wished to be a perfect Cynic, and to live virtuously, free from needless desires. The transformation that my teachers had worked so carefully to aeffect, I had at last made quite without knowing that I had made it: I had become a creature of two parts, a heart and a mind, which two parts were at war with one another.
Earlier I wrote that I have been trying to resolve these difficulties of the warring mind and heart, viz. that the mind cannot express the heart and be understood by others, and that the mind finds the heart dangerous. The first is especially difficult to resolve while I remain in the Neath, for I must communicate with you in English, which is not a language that I well understand or that I can command with ease. My heart does not speak to me in English, and neither do my dreams--or, I should say, neither do the dreams that are mine, and not the shared dreams of the Neath. This difficulty is why I hope that I might work in collaboration with such people as yourself, in order to make my sentiments as well understood as I can hope to make them in English. The second difficulty, I must work to resolve on my own, for I find that most or all of the poor choices I have made in my time here, I have made from a sense that my heart posed a danger to those I loved and wished to protect. Although no other can perform this work for me, neither can I undertake it without an idea of how to proceed, and thus I hope you will be willing to suggest courses that I might pursue.
The man I wish to be, and I think the man I should have been, is a man whose heart and mind are in accord, and whose mind understands and trusts the heart. If I cannot unite them entirely--and what a happy prospect it would be to unite mind and heart again!--then I hope that I can teach them to be partners, and indeed, perhaps even friends.
I beg your pardon for this long letter, which will probably be badly spelt and make little sense, and which I will regret having sent; my mind will berate me, that I have presented myself to disadvantage, and asked too much of you without promise of recompence, and bared myself to be hurt, and (worst of all) hurt you in the free relation of such thoughts as these. Therefor I think--in the clarity of a fever, which is a kind of prophetical madness--that I must send you this letter. If my heart cannot be trusted to have its say in such missives as these, then I cannot trust it any where.
I pray that you will write me, when your time and health permit it; although your last letter hurt me to read it, I was at the same time very glad that you had trusted me so far as to own the harm I had done you. Such trust is a priceless gift, and if our language does not yet suffice to connect us, with time, and trust, we might learn to convey our sentiments as perfectly as though we spoke our hearts' mother-tongue.
- H.