In May last year, I visited George with my sister and mother. On York Street, there’s a quaint second-hand shop called Blue Forest Bookshop & Collectables. As a book hoarder, it caught my eye.
My sister prefers the minimalism of e-books. My mother only ever reads Netwerk24 and neighbourhood WhatsApps about traffic, cows, and rabid seals.
But the youngest child always gets their way, so of course we stopped at the bookstore. Inside were creaky wooden floors, pillars of books, walls filled with old paintings, and an abundance of oddities.
I struck gold in the classics section. Someone had dropped off several beautiful, well-preserved hardcovers just the day before, each going for R80. I snapped them up.
They ended up on my bookshelf, unread, for the remainder of the year. For whatever reason, I craved short stories and non-fiction nature books at the time.
It was only when the summer holiday rolled around that I grew hungry for the classics. I packed them in my luggage before I left to visit family for Christmas.
Despite having read plenty of classics, the melodrama of the Victorians never ceases to astound me. Short-lived romantic trysts or a simple argument between friends can leave the characters in a state of inconsolable heartbreak.
Take Sybil Vane in The Picture of Dorian Gray, who chose death over enduring a night of rejection by some pompous jerk.
In contrast to this old-school obsession over the irrationality of love, the modern era has an almost clinical approach to love, not a far cry from A Brave New World’s setting.
We ghost instead of reject; we network instead of building community; we evaluate people as if they’re cars to purchase. It’s as if our hearts are stone.
I, myself, am a recovering stone-heart. I was scolded for crying too much as a child at school. During my teens and early 20s, I became my own emotion-enforcer. I went from always crying to never crying.
I knew that, to ‘win’ in this economy, one had to be as close to a robot as possible. To win, of course, was to make money. And then, maybe, with enough money made, I could sever myself from society and be free.
Thankfully, by my mid-20s, I realised it was easier to be a human than a robot, and anything easy to do is easy to master.
I put myself in spaces and circles where emotions, connection and love were encouraged. I redefined love for myself, too. For me, it’s a compulsion to care.
While I am still bad at romantic love, I’ve become a maestro of its other forms. I have a deep compulsion to care and love for my friends, communities, family, work and nature.
Despite this, reading these classic novels made me reflect on my heart’s ability to love. It seemed to have atrophied for most of my life, but I brought it back. How did I pull this off?
It wasn’t through finding the feeling of love. Love isn’t really a singular feeling, anyway, but a cacophony of ever-changing emotions. Think of Sybil and how love drove her to the deepest despair possible. Love can be as joyous as it can be agonising.
There it is. My answer.
Lying on shaded buffalo grass, I wrote in the little notebook I reserved for poetry and pretty prose: ‘A heart that can break is a heart that can love.’
As I made sense of what I wrote, it morphed into a stanza.
I realised during a loveless summer,
when a heart can break, it can also love;
you must cry or else it will petrify.
And so I wept.
I feel heartbreak every day. When I read the news. When someone in my community suffers. When my friends need help that I cannot give. When yet another ghost haunts my phone. When I remember lost friends.
So let your heart shatter, let yourself cry, let yourself care. But do so knowing that these tears will end and your heart will mend.
If you wallow too much in sorrow, you risk becoming a bit too much like Sybil. Somewhere between a Sybil-heart and a stone-heart is a thoughtful type of love that I’m practising, through allowing my heart to break and mend.