Canter Bridge

The density of the biblical proverbs allows the mistaken impression that the editor of these sayings is playing purposelessly with syllables. A quick read breezes by what it mistakes for truism when in fact a patient loitering around the saying is capable of uncovering a deeper truth.

Proverbs 15.13 is a case in point:

A glad heart makes a cheerful countenance,
but by sorrow of heart the spirit is broken.

One might suppose that a would-be poet with a penchant for lining up nice-sounding words has painted gold leaf around the mundane. ‘Happy = happy, sad = sad’ might be all this saying has to offer. Ornament trumps substance. There is, by this reading, very little here.

But the proverbialist is more intelligent than this and has accrued the right to be heard with more respect. What he is getting at is the deep inevitability of what one might call personal osmosis. What is on the inside will eventually find its way out. A man or a woman can keep up the charade of happiness only so long when the rot of sorrow is in the bones.

The proverb observes the priority of what a different era might call the life of the soul. If the soulful essence of a man trembles with joy, the face will show it, perhaps in the moment but necessarily over the long haul. By contrast, what the proverb describes as the spirit—here something like the observable genius of a particular human being—will eventually show the cracks, fissures, and seismic separations that occur when the heart, deep down, is stricken by sorrow.

The collector of biblical proverbs knows that a human being is an integral unit. One can play at contradiction, one can enact a theater of the self by which masks are changed as often as circumstances require. Yet eventually, incessantly, irrevocably, the true state of a woman finds its way to the face, where discerning onlookers note the fleeting shadow that casts itself across the eyes when the heart, deep below, is sick.