MUSINGS ON THE HEART AND CHARACTER

'There are more hearts than the one that shows up in clinical imaging."

"Could heart troubles in later years also refer to a troubled heart? No doubt, somewhere along the way each heart has failed. To medicalize these painful seizures into failures of the bag of blood inside your rib cage constricts the hart's rich implications."

"Character is concerned with the heart failures of love, inner truth, and honor, and with the suppression of beauty. For it is a daily fact that we tend to keep beauty out of our lives lest it strike our hearts and kindle fierce longings we do not know how to appease. An ECG will not reveal anything about these weaknesses, nor can a stress test expose them. Times when courage failed, when we held back our cordiality, lacked pity, or betrayed our heart's calling can preoccupy later years as much as any lab findings. Heart disease and heart unease may be as near each other in fact as in language."

"...character demands attention to core essentials, which require other sorts of discipline than giving up smoking and cutting out butter. Life review in an armchair can be an exhausting exercise of imagining, stretching the heart-core of character at least as far as a brisk walk with the dog."

"Perhaps it is not only the attrition caused by life's stresses that hardens the heart, but failed contrition for our heart's smallness."

"The heart crushed by its own faults is suffering another kind of massive coronary event that brings deep pain"

"As you lie rigid in your bed or stare out over water, the heart reenacts how you betrayed your friend forty years ago, played the evil sister, the negligent daughter, the shirking friend. You see clearly and feel fully the injuries caused to spouses, parents, lovers, partners, dependents strewn in the wake of your self-centered demands and delusional beliefs. Of all these injuries, those done to your own calling through failure to respond with passion to the heart's imagination hurt most. With its relentless attacks, contrition exposes the heart's failure."

"It is not the past that is tempered by contrition, but the gnawing guilt about it....
Contrition lifts from the heart the weight of the dead past, making mercy possible."

from James Hillman, The Force of Character, pp. 119-124 passim)