Ardent Hearts
Ardent Hearts
Earnest effort, the call, obligations that pull us back to shore (and Cormac serendipity)
It was Thursday — Writing the Rush day — and all I had were a couple mildly interesting (to me) snippets from the past two weeks, and they weren’t coming together into a post.
The first was about earnest effort and engagement. After an intense (and highly successful) race weekend that capped nearly a year of planning and hard work, it would have been completely appropriate for the Eastern States race committee to take some time off from the topic. But when our race director made a couple entries to the “Notes for 2023” Slack channel the day after we all got home, it brought a spontaneous and exuberant outpouring from the rest of the team (well over a hundred constructive individual notes, proposals large and small). We were not worn down as expected, we were full of ideas and energy and excitement, full of “how do we make this good thing even better?” It was deeply gratifying — the engagement, the earnest enthusiasm of these people I get to work with.
The second was about that classic battle between our wild selves and our domesticated selves. It came this time in the form of a text message from a friend. He sent me some wonderful river photos from his morning float, along with the comment that he’d wished he didn’t have obligations that required him to come back to shore. I don’t know that he meant to be metaphorical, but that’s how I received it, and I replied: “That’s the heart of it right there — obligations that require us to come back to shore — I’ve been feeling that conflict a lot lately.”
In truth, I’ve been feeling it for at least the past 45 years, and I’m not sure I’m any closer to resolving it for myself now than I was the first time I remember feeling it… as a teenager, standing in the snow on a back-pasture hill on a wintery evening, looking at the glowing windows of the distant farmhouse, knowing that I very much wanted to join the holiday gathering, to be in there with those people and in that comfort, but also that I very much wanted to turn away from it, to walk off into the darkness of the woods.
I was looking for a way to unite these two threads, but I wasn’t seeing it, and I was leaning towards giving up and taking a break from the newsletter. In fact, I decided it just wasn’t that important, and I went to the lake instead.
But the ideas followed me there.
I paddled around a bit, took some photos, but mainly I just floated. And sure enough, when it was time to go home, I felt that feeling, that strong urge to paddle away from shore instead. But as with my friend, obligations required me to do otherwise.
On the way home, I thought about the vast complexity of those obligations, and about one small subset of that: our obligation to the earnest efforts of others.
I knew I’d written about earnestness before, so I went looking in my journal for it, and I found this entry, which was not meant to be about any of that. It was just an admiring observation of the powerful writing of one of my favorite authors, Cormac McCarthy. The fact that I included my first two highlights from the book I was reading, and that they happen to fit today’s discussion (and that I stumbled onto this 7 years later) is pure serendipity.
From my journal: 21 May 2015 (Thursday)
I just started reading All the Pretty Horses and so far the story itself has not grabbed me, nor have the characters. But the language, the use of words and the images they create and the feelings they evoke — it is so powerful. And the thing is, it doesn’t really follow any of the ‘rules’ of good usage or construction or whatever. It just flows and rolls and goes on with its own rhythm and its own pace and it is not bound so much by traditional sentence structure or any of the things that you might have learned in English composition. There are incomplete sentences with no verbs. There is dialogue without quotes. And there are these fabulous long sentences that run on and on the way you actually experience things, without the punctuation and without the staccato interruption of periods. …. I had to open the book on my Kindle to confirm that it’s Cormac, not Cormack… and while I was there, I checked to see what I have highlighted so far.
Not much, but here is this one:
He crossed the old trace again and he must turn the pony up onto the plain and homeward but the warriors would ride on in that darkness they’d become, rattling past with their stone-age tools of war in default of all substance and singing softly in blood and longing south across the plains to Mexico.
And this one:
What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran in them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.
So right there, in the span of a couple pages, in the musings of a kid out on his horse on the family ranch, he has captured two of my deep and recurring themes — that combination of fear and longing at the idea of someday not turning back but following the warriors, and that idea about what I really respect in people, what I have inadequately called earnestness and that he makes the word “ardenthearted” for.
The pull is strong — in both directions, and we make a decision each day. We hear the call, and then we willingly submit to our various obligations. Sometimes, we make concessions to the beast within us — that’s what those floats on the river are, what a long-distance run is. They are small episodes of “singing softly in blood and longing” and they are enough to sate us for a while longer.
But implied in the necessity for decision is the possibility that someday we might choose differently, might be done with concessions, might stay on the old trace, might decide to keep on paddling.
