The Heart's Invisible Furies

by John Boyne

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.

“You reach a point where you realize that your life must go on regardless. You choose to live or you choose to die. But then there are moments, things that you see, something funny on the street or a good joke that you hear, a television program that you want to share, and it makes you miss the person who’s gone terribly and then it’s not grief at all, it’s more a sort of bitterness at the world for taking them away from you. I think of Bastiaan every day, of course. But I’ve grown accustomed to his absence. In some ways it was more difficult to get used to his presence once we started going out.”