Whitney FI’s Reviews > Shark Heart > Status Update

Most of all, Lewis wished he could tell his students that they transfigured his lonely ambition into a dream to change the world; how they were all artists of the highest caliber, fulfilling humankind’s highest duty and delivering the message: faith lived in the darkest rooms.

Rick could handle the sight of an open wound, work with no sleep, tell a patient they were dying, but did not have the courage to hold his own wife, or say he would love her until the day he died. A man of his era, one in a generation of boys who were trained to lead but never feel, one in a generation of boys who became staunch, withholding men in lonely rooms, looking out at life with no way to touch it.

If she stayed on the road, Wren could continue wrapping herself in the comfortable blanket of liminality. So she took a northern detour because returning home felt like a commitment to a life that could go on without him.

Wren saw now how passion was delicate and temporary, a visitor, a feeling that would come and go. Feelings fled under pressure; feelings did not light the darkness. What remained strong in the deep, the hard times, was love as an effort, a doing, a conscious act of will. Soulmates, like her and Lewis, were not theoretical and found. They were tangible, built.

Lewis was the sort of educator who changed his students, especially the young men, on a formative and fundamental level. As a grown man comfortable with his own vulnerability, he inspired his students to enter an uncommon domain, a place where fear, sadness, and rage were worthwhile experiences rather than things to smile through or tuck away.