Carson McCullers, My Shadow

In the last couple of days I’ve become quite intrigued by Carson McCullers all of a sudden, never having read anything by her. I don’t even remember what brought her to my mind this time around, though hers is a frequently dropped name, no less so since Oprah put “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter” on her book club list. So it could very well be that I am picking up on it from the collective unconscious, but it can only be so if something in me is resonating to it, to her. It just so happens that we decided to check out the twice-renovated Riverdale branch of the library yesterday afternoon, and there it was, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, in the paperback fiction section. I took my cue then and borrowed it, but I didn’t really look at it until this morning.

I am sitting with it beside me on the sofa now, and finding it difficult to look anywhere else. A young woman in a black and white photo is featured on the cover, her eyes direct on the camera. She is plain, with a simple cut to her straight hair, her face still child-like. But it is her eyes, the beseeching sadness and tragedy in them that makes you take a step closer, even in spite of yourself, and dare yourself to look deeper into the abyss you know to be beneath those two small pools on the surface. I think, this is what quiet longing looks like. I can now put a face to the aching longing I’ve felt before. I read on the back cover that this is her, Carson McCullers. I wonder if she had any idea how much she had inside of her at that time (the photo was taken when she was 29), and if the same compelling force was behind the early bloom of her first novel, published to acclaim when she was only 23. Had she known she would die young then?

But it isn’t the sadness or the loneliness or the longing that shook me to the core; it is the depth that I cannot see nor touch, that is so inviting, beckoning like a siren at sea, to submit myself to the bottomless despair of her soul. Had I known this kind of despair in some other lifetime, that its call becomes incessant at times in this life? I have the feeling most of it still lurks in my shadow this day, and it is the right time now to go in.