The heart in literature

Hello!

I am fascinated by the use of the heart as a short-hand for deeply-felt emotions and a source of true honesty. This occurs in Shakespeare, in the Bible, in everyday speech today. I want to find out more about where that started from and its impact on our understanding of our selves/souls and bodies.

Could anyone direct me to things to read on this topic? And does anyone has ideas themselves about any role of the heart in self-beyond-the-physical either in literature or in life?

Thanks!

Isla

Interesting topic. I'm waiting to see how this thread develops, but in the meantime, have a look at this short story.

Welcome to LitNet.

Regards

I just thought about that last night. It seems contemporary novelists avoid writing about someone's heart and even mentioning love. I so want to go against the grain that I wrote this one, an excerpt from the novel I've been writing. I hope I understood your post correctly.


"Bombarded with disturbing thoughts about my father’s health and with morbid images worse than the photos I once saw in a medical journal, I forced myself to think of the happiest memory I had with him: when we went ocean fishing and caught a baby tuna, a bluefin the size of his bare feet.

He let the small fish go because I cried; I did not want a mother to lose a child, but he had a different scenario in mind he posed like a dilemma I had to solve.

“If I catch his father, are you also going to ask me to let him go?” His sly smile looked like he was playing tricks on me. He did not use “it”.

“Of course, I am,” I said without over-thinking his question.

“Why should I let him go and not hit his head with this paddle?”

“Because… because… just because….”

“C’mon. You can do it. It’s a simple question.”

But I did not go for a simple answer. Instead, I asked, “Who will teach his son how to explore the ocean? Who will teach him how to hunt for food? Who will teach him how to protect his mother and his siblings from sharks?”

My father did not say a word, but his quiet thoughts seemed as deep as the stirred, restless ocean. He stood on the boat, complacent to its rocking and swaying. His eyes moist, he fixed his gaze at the big, blue swells of the Pacific and then on the far horizon that glowed a shade of orange—between salmon and coral—the early hint of sunset.

We went home empty-handed, not even a sardine in our bucket, but my head was full of happy thoughts about my father’s kindly heart that made me smile all the way home. On that day, I became someone he would trust and someone whom he would listen."

You might also want to watch this. Seek forward to 5m11s. It's about 20 minutes long.

Regards

Thank you all!

Just read Chinese poetry mind, heart, feeling, emotion, etc. all are represented by the word 心, xin, or heart, which is a graph of a heart. The word appears almost constantly in poetry, to the point where there are periods where it doesn't appear as a means of getting around its use. One could also read the book Kokoro, which is a Japanese reading of the character, heart.

In The Good Soldier, the protagonist's adulterous wife has a heart illness.
then there's Poe's 'The Tell-Tale Heart'.