Favorite excerpts from The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers.
The first excerpt is Portia, housekeeper at the Kelly house and a sort of mother substitute for the children of the house, speaking to Mick Kelly, a girl in her early teens:
This afternoon you going to roam all over the place without never being satisfied. You going to traipse all around like you have to find something lost. You going to work yourself up with excitement. Your heart going to beat heard enough to kill you because you don’t love and don’t have peace.”
The second exerpt is at the end of the story, it is Biff Brannon, owner of the New York Cafe in the small Southern town of the novel’s setting, reflecting on his life:
Then suddenly he felt a quickening in him. His heart turned and he leaned his back against the counter for support. For in a swift radiance of illumination he saw a glimpse of human struggle and of valor. Of the endless fluid passage of humanity through endless time. And of those who labor and of those who—one word—love. His soul expanded. But for a moment only. For in him he felt a warning, a shaft of terror. Between the two worlds he was suspended. He saw that he was looking at his own face in the counter glass before him. Sweat glistened on his temples and his face was contorted. One eye was opened wider than the other. The left eye delved narrowly into the past while the right gazed wide and afrightened into a future of blackness, error, and ruin. And he was suspended between radiance and darkness. Between bitter irony and faith. Sharply he turned away.”
I suppose these two passages speak to me because I feel like they reflect my own life. And they are similar because they describe a person who can not commit to either love or labor and instead hover between the two, watching and searching for something they can’t define.
