Our Hearts in Ink

Our Hearts in Ink

Sean O’Hare

I have always envied those people who, from the time of their twelfth birthday, have their entire career trajectory mapped out. The confidence with which they lay out their watertight plan to become a veterinarian or dentist always left me profoundly acquainted with the aimlessness of my own life goals. 

It produced something akin to the experience of reading a biography of some great historical figure, against whose towering achievements one always feels equal parts inspired and dejected.

Unsurprisingly, the effects of my own personal career drift was a period of about six months after my high school graduation, during which I sat brooding at home, with neither a collegiate plan or a job. The—also inevitable—outcome of this was an uncomfortable conversation with my parents, when they informed me, lovingly, gently, of course, that I needed to find myself some work. So I applied for positions and found a part time job that would pay me to crawl out of bed in the middle of the night and work until the sun came up.

Exhausted in the Warehouse

There I labored in a warehouse full of boxes. Endless piles of them. The tangle of chutes and belts in that place was like the circulatory system of some lumbering, clumsy giant, pushing boxes through clogged passageways, always pouring more out onto the belts where the trucks were parked. My task was to unload the docked trailers, fresh off the highway that hummed just a half mile from the warehouse, trailers that came from Kansas and Montana and California with unending stacks of those dreadful brown packages.

It was in one of those cold, dark trailers in the middle of the night that I gained my first glimpse of clarity. Here I was, less than a week into my new line of work and already I found myself utterly exhausted, still in those terrible stages where the body, before it is benumbed altogether, rebels against the awful conditions pressed upon it in places like that warehouse. 

That night in the trailer, as I saw a life for myself surrounded by an infinite sea of nothing but boxes, I resolved that I would not stay there, that I could not stay there. I would go to college and find a different way to make my living. Not because I was better than these people I worked alongside—for whom I had already gained an immense respect—but because I simply yearned for something fundamentally different, something outside the universe of this warehouse. I did not know it then, but it was stories that I longed for: ancient texts, modern translations, ideas and philosophies and histories. That great conversation which has been unfolding for millennia began to hound me, showing itself to me in snatches, drawing me further in. 

*

And so I went to school. A few months later I found myself at the local community college, my intellectual home for the next year and a half. I remained uncertain of which bachelor’s degree I wanted to pursue, so I took general courses, emerging on the other end with an Associates degree in Liberal Arts. A good start, I told myself. I did well enough in those courses, read enough of the chapters and articles to satisfy my teachers, did enough of the exercises and homework assignments to graduate with a respectable GPA. Something was awakened here, but not fully; a foundation laid for further scaffolding.

The blue-collar work continued apace. While attending school, I landscaped and delivered pizzas. After graduation I was hired by a moving company to work as a diesel mechanic in their shop, changing tires and drum brakes and rebuilding engines. Somewhere in the middle of all this I found myself reading more and more in my free time. I don’t know how it began, nor can I account for its growth, but soon it consumed me, filling every free moment. The Gojo soap never cleaned out all the grit, so I went to lunch with dirty hands, oil-soaked shirts and Lewis’s Mere Christianity tucked under my arm. 

The Reading Consumes

I read of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s life, listened on my morning commute to historical novels I had checked out from the library. An intricate dance began to emerge between these two threads of my life: working in a world of trucks, wrenches and oil; reading of philosophy, theology and history. The questions of life presented themselves to me through the real, entrenched features of my everyday experiences, and were answered and posed again in ink. 

The fiction I read was no fiction at all. When I looked up from the page, I saw deeper into the text. When I looked back at the page, the whole world inhabited it anew, filling it again with the colors and characters that animated life with such jarring vibrancy, such unrelenting personality and energy.

As this bookish dance continued, I began to see that this was in fact no new development but a fresh manifestation of something I had already been given, growing from the literary and intellectual tradition I had received in middle and high school. I was homeschooled my whole life, and both parents had planted a love for literature deep in my heart. Our family often read books together in the evening; we belligerently debated ideas, passages and politics over dinner and then long after dinner had ended. Whole days spent in the local library were a common occurrence, and we listened incessantly to dramatized productions of the Chronicles of Narnia and Les Misérables. Notably, a central feature of my homeschool education was the development of an ability to select new pathways of learning, interrogating ideas as directed by my interests and under the steady guidance of my mother.

These habits lay dormant for a time, but slowly awakened after my college years. Now I was free to pursue whatever interested me, having been equipped to take it up. And there was little that did not interest me. This of course presented a glorious dilemma: there were far too many books to be read. In fact, I soon began to realize that there really was no such thing as a singular book, that the concept of a distinct piece of literature truly is a tenuous claim. In reality, I began to see that the boundaries of a book were merely a thin film through which countless other texts—which themselves contained a myriad of others—bled in and out. 

Each book was unique only in the sense that it was able to synthesize its predecessors in its own peculiar manner. Beyond this, to speak of a book as existing within a vacuum was a failure to perceive the thousands of minds at work within its pages; to read one book was to read a dozen others, was to read its influences and its antithesis. In the same way I could not untangle books from the world around me, I could not untangle them from each other. They were inextricably bound to their counterparts through some mysterious force I did not fully understand.

To this project I turned with a passion, seeking out the sources of each text that I had stumbled upon, straining to hear the voices reverberating throughout their pages. I read Chesterton and he spoke of Dickens with a kind of awe; I read Dickens, and in his tales I saw the very same faces that pulled the trucks behind the shop for me to work on, the faces that had filled the warehouse I worked in years before. I discovered The Iliad’s influence on the Western canon, so I read of Hector and Achilles and the great quarrel of their people. I consumed Tolkien’s trilogy and was drawn into the ancient world he had wrought; soon I was exploring its annals further, reading of Beren and Luthien in The Silmarillion. I read in one book a passage taken from Tolstoy’s Confessions; I went to it and found the same spiritual and philosophical questions which had filled my own mind since youth, gathered into a single narrative and articulated with an unparalleled clarity and power; because of this I turned to Anna Karenina, read of jealousy and forgiveness and despair, of Levin’s struggles within himself and with the ultimate questions of existence.

An Insatiable Hunger for Words

My insatiable hunger for words soon drove me to seek a deeper knowledge of that intermediary, translating element: the mind of a writer. How was it that one could bring the literary and physical worlds together in such a way as to produce a truer version of each one? With every new book I began to observe how different authors,
old and new, accomplished this in their own unique way. Eventually, because I had been setting down roots within literary soil for so long, a desire to try my own hand at the craft began to grow.

I can recall distinctly the experience of reading Chesterton for the first time, of loving it so much that I foolishly suspected I could write something just like it—or at least close to it. So I tried to write like Chesterton. And I failed of course; not because I didn’t know the streets of London well enough to make witty analogies of them, but because I lacked the gargantuan, expansive mind, the spiritual maturity, the biting wit, the unbridled vitality and energy that crouched behind every syllable. I had not lived the life of Chesterton, had not read the books he had read, was unable to truly emulate his style for the simple fact that his style had run its course with the last word that he had penned. And mine, I soon began to see, was taking its own shape, taking a piece of his style, to be sure, but was forming itself to the contours of my own life. It was being filled with my unique memories and images, the particular books I had read, the people I had spoken to. So I kept on writing, learning what I could from teachers like Austen, Poe, Longfellow, Dostoyevsky, Wordsworth and Hugo, practicing the craft as often as I could.

Enter the Internet. As my literary horizons expanded, so too did the possibilities in this arena. I found so many others on blogs and journals and forums who had been at this for much longer, who were reading with a sharper analytical eye, who were writing with more clarity and carrying out intricate conversations on complex questions. I soon developed an affinity for the sprawling style of New Yorker profiles, devoured book reviews wherever they could be found, followed bloggers and online writers as they carried out far-ranging debates. These online connections even spilled over into the real world. One spring, I drove down to South Carolina and attended a weeklong ethics and philosophy course led by a theologian and writer whose blog I had been reading for years.

In so many online spaces I found that the nature of discourse was particularly suited for robust conversations playing out in real time, essays that begot essays that begot more essays. Here was the opportunity to peer into the world of academia and scholarship, to perceive some of its intricacies and the personalities that populated it. All this in turn greatly sharpened my own ideas, introducing me to a world I had never thought existed, that I found myself wishing I could be a part of. And so I read on and wrote more, and found places that would publish my work, and eventually a place that entrusted to me the task of publishing and curating the writing of others. 

More years passed.

The Dream of Cambridge

On a bright spring day in 2019 I found myself on a double-decker bus, approaching the city of Cambridge from the English countryside. On the ride into the city, I reflected on the vocational drift that still hounded me years after my graduation from community college. Although I was still reading and writing voraciously on my own time, I remained no closer to a vision for my life’s work. To add to the sting, only a few months prior I had dropped out of a calculus class.

Since my time as a diesel mechanic I had spent the past few years working as a technician at a scientific research facility in my city. There I gathered data for scientists who came from all over the world to conduct bizarre, fascinating physics experiments. 

The university that ran the lab offered excellent tuition benefits for a STEM-related degree, prompting me to eventually sign up for mathematics courses. I labored through them, but it soon became clear to me that I had no special affinity for numbers. Finally, after a few semesters of this mirage, the calculus class was dropped and hopes of an engineering career were abandoned. This produced in me a growing confusion and frustration. I was unable to determine a clear path to follow from there and increasingly uncertain about what the future held.

It was against this backdrop that I traveled for two weeks in Europe at the generous invitation of my uncle. The final leg of my trip found me in an English town a few miles outside of Cambridge, staying with friends who encouraged me to spend a day exploring the nearby city. 

The bus was stopping now and I went along on foot into the city, passing Magdalene College where C.S. Lewis had taught medieval literature, then up and over the bridge that spans the River Cam. I heard the punters call to each other with mirth in their voices as they meandered by me on the winding river. More colleges were on my right now, their ancient buildings rising proudly against the brilliant spring sky. Students rolled by me on their bikes, porters guarded the college entrances against curious tourists like myself, and professors emerged from old stone buildings and hurried along on foot with their work tucked under their arm.

With each step I felt a growing sense of clarity. I wandered down side streets and past towering churches, passed the college grounds where Newton had walked, found Lewis’s favorite pub where he had spent so many hours with Tolkien. From the top of Great St. Mary’s church I looked out over the town, taking in the colleges where Wordsworth and Darwin and Hawking had studied. Across the street was the magnificent King’s College Chapel. There I was overtaken with awe at the stunning vaulted ceilings and the intricate scenes in stained glass that lined the hall, the brilliant afternoon sunlight slanting through the panes and filling the chapel with a thousand colored rays.

Later that afternoon I crossed Parker’s Piece, an open, grassy park, so caught up with excitement that I entertained searching for an office where I could inquire about an application. I was a tourist there that day, yet I could not stop imagining myself as a student, walking those same streets with a new kind of purpose. I had never been able to picture anything more vividly than this.  

I felt the uncertainty of the past few months and years melt away completely. Here it seemed that my reading had not been a random string of books, but a coherent pattern that mapped so well onto this storied institution. And although I had longed in recent years for a life that centered around reading and scholarship, it had taken the act of standing here surrounded by all these ancient colleges of learning for me to put that yearning into words. 

Back at the house, I told my friends of my remarkable day and deluded scheming. Instead of laughter I was greeted with enthusiasm. That very night, I decided I would apply to the University of Cambridge to study English Literature.

The following months brought endless paperwork. Personal statements, an academic reference from the theologian I had studied with, digging up old school records for my application. Friends and family offered support, some came to my aid with their invaluable expertise. Finally, after submitting my application, I received a request for written work; a few weeks later, an invitation for an interview. I traveled to Cambridge for the interview, then back home again. I waited.

And then there it was.

“I am delighted to inform you…”

An email from my college, telling me that I would be spending the next three years in Cambridge reading English Literature. The past eight years of wandering, failing, working, reading and writing all finally captured and answered in a single sentence.

“We would like to make you an offer…”

My mind rushed back to those disheartening six months at home after high school, the jobs shoveling mulch and changing tires and gathering scientific data. I was deeply grateful for all of it—not in some romantic sense, but because of the real experiences and wisdom it had imparted to me. I felt again what it had been like surrounded by boxes on that night in the frigid trailer, a still unformed vision seizing me in that moment.

If only I had known what it would bring. I recalled how that had prompted my return to school, picking up books again, the headlong rush that followed, the years trying my own hand at the craft of writing, the countless conversations with family and friends about the books we read and what they meant to our lives.

And in this slow unfolding of my own tale, I see too that heaving multitude of human minds which came before, those mighty souls who knew that to write down the mysteries of this life is to see them more clearly; that to read them back again is to know oneself and the world that ever presses in upon us. Day rolls into day, and year to year, and still we spill our hearts in ink, and find ourselves reflected on the page.

—

Sean O’Hare
Writer & Academic

Sean O’Hare is reading English Literature at the University of Cambridge; his writing has appeared in Mere Orthodoxy, The American Conservative and the Forefront Festival blog.

Photography by Cal Agro