The Epigraph.
Courage, dear heart.
-C.S. Lewis
I am most emotional on the amtrak, I’ve noticed. Maybe it's a female thing, a menstrual thing, a nostalgia thing, or maybe I am just human. I know this is all good and normal intuitively, but the bearded man next to me playing some sophisticated, adult version of candy crush is incredibly uncomfortable. That may be a bit presumptuous coming from my 25 year old brain, the grey in his beard makes me think he’s seen an emotional artist before, maybe this has been felt before, maybe this is a shared experience.
While I am holding back tears just enough to make out these tiny words that help me better understand why all these deep emotions are coming up, I keep coming back to my time in the Vineyard bookstore yesterday. Words make me feel most emotional. A synonym for this phrase would be, words make me feel most alive.
My favorite part of a book is the epigraph. Right at the beginning, often in italics, a few vague yet all encompassing lines that hint at what the whole piece to follow is inspired by. I like that it's short, doesn’t tell you nearly anything, but evokes feelings and serves as a more potent reminder of the meaning behind the story. Allegedly.
While most curious children flip to see the pictures in a book to decide if it is in fact the story they want to be immersed in, adults will read the back blurb, summarizing the 207 pages of book and asking themselves is this worth my time? But my favorite way to develop curiosity for literature is often italicized right at the beginning asking: do you feel the meaning here?
Yesterday, as I wandered around this bookstore and flipped from epigraph to epigraph, trying to collect as many feelings as I could, I came across one that hit me deep in my chest. A grey cover, the type of grey that would be a good paint color for the hallway walls of a modern home, with a fabric like texture reminiscent of something old but has been kept out of importance, caught my eye. I picked it up, flipped to page three and read: Courage, dear heart. -C.S. Lewis
Now in seat 5C, next to an older gentleman who would have loved the Webkinz arcade games I used to play, these three words are flipping around in my head like Aly Raisman in 2012. Courage, dear heart. Courage, dear heart. Courage.
The other day I was sitting in the most gorgeous office space I have yet to enter into, looking over all of central park, sitting across from the Chief Operating Officer of an asset management firm I was interviewing with, as he hit me with the hard hitting question: What do you like to do in your free time? Courage, dear heart. “I write”. Publicly or in a journal? “Publically, I have a blog.” What do you write about? “Mostly love”. I replied.
AI is going to take our jobs! But you know what it is not going to take? My husband. Fingers crossed. God willing. Jeez I should really get on that! Hinge, Raya, Bumble, is Christian Mingle even a thing anymore? Warren Buffett and David Brooks have come to the general consensus that the most important decision any of us will ever make is who we will marry. Well shucks, here I am trying to figure out if I should choose a picture with friends so he knows I have those or if a preferable investment of these ~six images to determine your wife~ may be better allocated to one that comes off as interesting, fashionable, intelligent, dare I say, special. Wow, choosing photos for your cover is no small feat!
Oh and don’t even get me started on these prompts. Just a short blurb of me to summarize? Should I reveal I like honey bees? Probably wait until the third date so he doesn't think I am weird. But I am weird, odd, unique, if you’re one of those people who doesn’t use negative adjectives to describe others. Maybe I should just delete this, things still happen in real life right?
Jokes aside, we need to be dating, not just swiping. We need our hearts broken, that's how you know you loved, tried, went for it. The way our generation is going about dating is a problem. And might I add, becoming realer and realer. The word realer doesn't exist, but this problem is growing in its reality. We’re 25, with great jobs, nicer apartments than our parents ever had but less sex than your Grandma and her friends. Yikes! That’s a tough pill to swallow. Dating is nerve-wracking, for all of us. But it's scary and vulnerable because we care, it’s because this is important to us. It’s because this the most important! Right Warren?
I don’t know what the solution is. Dating apps are not going away but I think we need to remember that there is a person behind these profiles (usually, Ha Ha). And that person has pages and pages of stories, experiences, joys, fears, anxieties, insecurities, longings. We are social creatures, wired for connection and I think as a whole we are starving. Not for options or abundance, but for depth and detail, we want the story.
If I have learned anything as a consumer of literature it is that the visual covers of books draw us in, the blurbs give us a taste, the epigraph excites us with possibility, but there is truly nothing that eludes us more than the pages and pages of detail. I would argue, the place of greatest intimacy between writer and reader are the words that make up the whole story.
So where do we start? At the epigraph.
Courage, dear heart. -C.S. Lewis
Love Always,
Casey
