The proper price for such or such a thing in the Market might be
one-and-twenty drops of red human blood. But I headlongly pay for it
one-and-ninety drops: each one touched with fire, shot with purple,
tinctured with hottest spirit-essence. The proper payment for Love is
to pay back value received--which is enough. But I in addition dip
my white bare foot into red world-and-hell flames by way of quixotic
bonus. When other persons emerge from Love with the old-fashioned
accustomed wounds and scars I emerge with besides an immensely
useless futilely ruined foot.
It is wildest foolishness. Not merely folly. Folly is something
picturesque--a bit romantic.
I am oddly a fool. It is that consciousness that rushes over me with
each sad black thought of my Broken Heart.
My Broken Heart--it feels half-false to myself as I write it. And
the written words look half-false to my eyes. But it is realer than
my fingernails: than my palms: than my aching left foot.
My Broken Heart, besides being a triviality is a mistake, and will
pass in time doubtless, but is long about it.
It is one thing I do not dwell upon in this book of me. A Broken
Heart is sharply immediate like a newly-bitten tongue. It may bleed
at a touch. To dwell on it connects me strainedly with the world
around, and the world is really gone from me. This book is I as I
breathe alone. I cannot write in it the silly shadowy Breaking of my
Broken Heart. This writing is I Just Beneath My Skin. My Broken Heart
is beneath bones and flesh. And though my M.-MacLane heart intact is
wildly individual, my Broken Heart is merely human: made not alone by
me and not alone by God. Its place in this I write is just outside
the margins.
At times my Broken Heart feels far off while I’m feeling it hideous
and wan inside my breast. Myself is Me, and much of Me had nothing
to do with my Heart when it Broke: though I loved with all of Me. I
loved with all of Me one who lives in New York--and I lost and lost,
all the way. There was mere human ordinariness about which I built
up a strangely sincere temple-of-grace which I looked to see shed
light on my life like the new eternal beauty of a Day-break. I gave
the best I knew to it, from the distance, and I lost. The day was
a little day and broke at last only like my Heart. All was broken
without so much as clasp-of-hands.
I am realest, strongest, passionately-sincerest in my essential known
falseness--
It was all foolish and petty and someway false but I felt foolishly
and shudderingly that I could live no more. But I am singularly brave
from life-long custom. I have no pleas and surrenderings in me. I
shudder but live on.
One Thursday I felt suddenly oppressed and beset and something in my
throat cried out to the absent God to help me and guard me.
It was something in my throat which shrieked it dumbly in the
deafening silence in my room. It was not I myself: for I am
unsuppliant toward everyone human and divine though there often come
such Thursdays.
Harder than Thursdays are Fridays and some other days when comes a
familiar sharp twist beneath my chest-bones without the cognizance
of my remembering thoughts: and when though I strive against it my
Broken Heart makes me sit longish half-hours with my head on my hands.
_A dark bright fierce fire_