What Becomes the Heart

I have been thinking, over these past quiet days, about all the books I've failed to complete, or to render finely enough. I spent years writing a novel about the campesinos of El Salvador; it sits in the basement somewhere. Five years were given over to a domestic tale called (after my great-grandfather, Horace Kephart) The Aura of Loneliness; it was too quiet, found no publishing home. I've written 80 drafts of a novel that takes place in an olive cortijo in post-Spanish Civil War Spain—and I'm still writing that novel in my head. There was a book of essays, back when my life was given over to the planful writing of essays.

What is the point of writing books that others may never read? What is the point of writing at all? This morning, reviewing my own failed fragments, my own self-contained or collapsed concepts, I feel not angst at all the "wasted" time (which is how I've often referred to those projects—what a shame, such wasted time). Instead I feel gratitude at my own younger, yearning self, who thought to grab at the float of life passing by and to tether it—imperfectly—to the ground.

For the sake of mornings like these—so pitch dark, so set up against storm—when I rediscover, for example, my uncle, Dan D'Imperio, sitting here so that I might find him all these many years on:

My Uncle Danny was always taller than the rest of us, and his hair, whooshing as it did across his head like some deracinated wave, made him seem even taller than he was, as if he came from Hollywood, when in fact he rarely left the Jersey shore. He was idiosyncratic, and we loved him for that. He was an artist and a writer, a seeker and horder of the singular and strange, so that his modest split level was filled with antiquities and kitsch, broken busts and amulets, a peg-legged couch, a bear-head rug, a Waterford, that briny air. I vaguely remember the dynamic of his house, the way, at the kitchen, where he poached his eggs, you could go downstairs, or you could go up. And I remember—like a dream, I remember—how, if you went outside through the thin screen doors, there was absolutely nothing—no trees, no grass, no zinging fireflies. Only the smell of the beach, several miles east. A ghost of a smell. Ephemeral. Lasting.

For we were hardly ever in our Uncle Danny’s house, my brother, my sister, and I. We imagined it mostly, from the stories he told, and from the gifts that he brought us, each Christmas. We imagined how he lived from what he gave to us, imagined that we came to possess what he left behind—the shells and sweaters and old scrapbooks, the rose-shaped earrings in their little turtle box, the Christmas balls he fashioned with his long and graceful hands. We imagined his gifts into covenants. Into ligaments tying truth to us, and us always back to him.