The Heart's Invisible Furies

by John Boyne

my mother looked over the side of the railings into the River Liffey, a filthy determination of brown and green making its way urgently towards the Irish Sea as if it wanted out of the city as quickly as possible, leaving the priests, the pubs and the politics far behind it.

But for all that we had, for all the luxury to which we were accustomed, we were both denied love, and this deficiency would be scorched into our future lives like an ill-considered tattoo inscribed on the buttocks after a drunken night out, leading each of us inevitably towards isolation and disaster.

‘No, of course not,’ she said. ‘It’s a hideous profession. Entered into by narcissists who think their pathetic little imaginations will be of interest to people they’ve never met.’

‘What you know about women,’ replied Maude, ‘could be written in large font on the back of a postage stamp and there’d still be room for the Lord’s Prayer.

wouldn’t be my standard at all.

‘I think they’re what are commonly referred to as socialites,’ she said, her voice dripping with disdain. ‘The dictionary definition would be a bunch of self-regarding, narcissistic, physically attractive but intellectually hollow individuals whose parents have so much money that they don’t need to do a day’s work themselves. Instead, they go from party to party, desperate to be seen, while gradually corroding from the inside out, like a spent battery, due to their lack of ambition, insight or wit.’

A line came into my mind, something that Hannah Arendt had once said about the poet Auden: that life had manifested the heart’s invisible furies on his face.