In the Midst of Winter

by Isabel Allende

Lena’s life was consumed by rancor until she finally realized that her husband was still harming her from the grave, and it was her anger rather than his betrayal that was destroying her.

“I’ve never been loved like that, Richard, love has always been in half measures for me,”

He preached to his students that order is an art rational beings possess, a ceaseless battle against centrifugal force, because the natural dynamic of all living things is to expand, multiply, and end in chaos. As a proof you only had to observe human behavior, the voracity of nature, and the infinite complexity of the universe.

Busy with their own lives, his parents loved him without smothering him, treating him with mild neglect, as was common in those days before children became projects.

“You never ask people in need who they are or where they’ve come from, Richard. We’re all the same in misfortune,”

“No one grows old after they have died, daughter.” In her mother’s last days, Lucia understood that death was not an end, was not the absence of life, but a powerful oceanic wave of clear, luminous water that was carrying her off to another dimension. Lena was loosening her ties to the earth, letting herself be borne on the wave, free of any anchor and the weight of gravity; light, a translucent fish driven on by the current.

Hearts don’t break like eggs. And if yours is an egg, isn’t it better for it to be broken and for feelings to pour out? That’s the price for a life lived to the full,”

“Love has always been in half measures for me,”

“I don’t want to go on living this kind of half life,” he told Lucia. “I don’t want to be this cowardly man. I want you to want me, Lucia.”

According to Daniela, when you sleep with someone the two energies are combined. This can be enriching for both, or can be very negative for the weaker of the two. “Just as well you didn’t sleep in the same bed as my papa, because your aura would have been burned to a cinder,”

“That’s many years with your soul in winter and your heart locked away, Richard. That’s not a life. And the fearful man of those years is not you. In these last few days, when you were forced out of your comfort zone you were able to discover who you really are. It may be painful, but anything is better than being anesthetized.”

His life was not a succession of separate moments, it was a tangled story, a changing, chaotic, and imperfect tapestry he had woven day by day. His present was not a blank screen, it was packed with images, dreams, memories, shame, guilt, loneliness, pain, all his damned reality, as he told Lucia in whispers that night.

It’s not the force of gravity that keeps the universe in balance, but the binding power of love.”

‘In the midst of winter, I finally found there was within me an invincible summer.’ ”