The Ways of Desire*

On my way north, twenty years ago, I stopped at the ruins of Macchu Picchu, Inca city of refuge in the Andes, and I stood alone there, high up in the sunset, watching the llamas come down into the plaza below me and settle in a circle for the night. As the sun set and the twilight changed, I almost expected the people, too, of the Incas to return. I left finally in the dark to find my own bed around the other side of the mountain. Then early in the morning I came out again to see the sunrise, though the high horizons of the Andes were clouded. I felt disappointed, but I waited, hoping the clouds would break. I waited on for an hour, and then the clouds did part and I could see the sun had not yet risen over the mountains tops, that it was just about to appear. Then its bright edge did show, and the first ray, as it seemed to me, struck the strangely shaped stone at my feet that was, I learned afterwards, a sundial, and then the sunlight spread through the ruins of the city. As the sun rose, the llamas rose too, and my heart rose within me. I knew there was life here and hope, there was resurrection from the dead.

Our heart's desire is for life and light and love. I could feel it at that sunrise that was also heart rise. We desire to know and be known, to love and be loved. Yet there is a flaw, I could see it in the ruins that were revealed in the sunlight, for “The lonely of heart is withered away” (Yeats, 1963). The fairy child signs this in Yeats's play, The Land of Heart's Desire. In fact, in the original version of the