Barnes. Pdf

you. I'm home again, and there's no mocking echo on the words. Je t'aime. Ti amo (with soda). And if you had no tongue, no 
celebrating language, you'd do this: cross your hands at the wrist with palms facing towards you; place your crossed wrists 
over your heart (the middle of your chest, anyway); then move your hands outwards a short distance, and open them towards 
the object of your love. It's just as eloquent as speech. And imagine all the tender modulations that are possible, the subtleties 
that can be constructed from kissing knuckles, matching palms and playful fingertips whose whorled pads bear the proof of our 
individuality. 
But matching palms mislead. The heart isn't heart-shaped, that's one of our problems. We imagine, don't we, some neat 

---

J
ULIAN 
B
ARNES
: A History of the World in 10 ½
 
Chapters 
75
[p. 237]
bivalve whose shape encodes the way in which love fuses two halves, two separatenesses, into a whole? We imagine this crisp 
symbol scarlet with a powerful blush, scarlet also with the blood of tumescence. A medical textbook doesn't immediately 
disenchant us; here the heart is mapped like the London Underground. Aorta, left and right pulmonary arteries and veins, left 
and right subclavian arteries, left and right coronary arteries, left and right carotid arteries ... it looks elegant, purposeful, a 
confident network of pumping tubes. Here the blood runs on time, you think. 
Reverberent facts: 
− 
the heart is the first organ to develop in the embryo; when we are no more than the size of a kidney bean, our heart is 
visible, pumping away; 
− 
in a child, the heart is proportionately much larger than in an adult: 1/130
th
of total body weight, as opposed to 1/300
th
; 
− 
during life the size, shape and position of the heart are subject to considerable variations; 
− 
after death the heart assumes the shape of a pyramid. 
The ox heart I bought at Corrigans weighed 2lbs 13oz and cost £ 2.42p. The biggest available animal specimen; but also one 
with human application. `He had the heart of an ox': a phrase from the literature of Empire, of adventure, of childhood. Those 
pith-helmeted cavaliers who despatched rhinos with a single well-placed slug from an army pistol while the colonel's daughter 
cowered behind the baobab had simple natures but not, if this ox was anything to go by, simple hearts. The organ was heavy, 
squat, bloody, clamped tight like a violent fist. Unlike the railway map in the textbook, the real thing proved close and 
reluctant with its secrets. 
I sliced it up with a radiologist friend. `It hadn't got long to go, this ox,' she commented. Had the heart belonged to one of 
her patients, he wouldn't have pangaed his way through many more jungles. Our own small journey was effected with a 
Sabatier kitchen knife. We hacked our way into the left atrium 
[p. 238]
and left ventricle, admiring the porterhouse heft of the muscles. We stroked the silky Rue de Rivoli lining, poked our fingers 
into exit wounds. The veins were stretch elastic, the arteries chunky squid. A post-mortal blood clot lay like a burgundy slug in 
the left ventricle. We frequently lost our way in this compacted meat. The two halves of the heart did not ease apart as I'd 
fancifully imagined, but clung desperately round one another like drowning lovers. We cut into the same ventricle twice, 
believing we'd found the other one. We admired the clever valve system, and the chordae tendineae which restrain each valve 
from opening too far: a tough little parachute harness preventing over-deployment of the canopy. 
After we'd finished with it, the heart lay on a stained bed of newspaper for the rest of the day, reduced to an unpromising 
dinner. I went through cookbooks to see what I might do with it. I did find one recipe, for stuffed heart served with boiled rice 
and wedges of lemon, but it didn't sound very inviting. It certainly didn't merit the name given it by the Danes, who invented it. 
They call this dish Passionate Love. 
Do you remember that paradox of love, of the first few weeks and months of Passionate Love (it's capitalized, like the 
recipe, to begin with) - the paradox about time? You are in love, at a point where pride and apprehension scuffle within you. 
Part of you wants time to slow down: for this, you say to yourself, is the best period of your whole life. I am in love, I want to 
savour it, study it, lie around in languor with it; may today last forever. This is your poetical side. However, there is also your 
prose side, which urges time not to slow down but hurry up. How do you know this is love, your prose side whispers like a 
sceptical lawyer, it's only been around for a few weeks, a few months. You won't know it's the real thing unless you (and she) 
still feel the same in, oh, a year or so at least; that's the only way to prove you aren't living a dragonfly mistake. Get through 
this bit, however much you enjoy it, as fast as possible; then you'll be able to find out whether or not you're really in love. 
A photograph develops in a tray of liquid. Previously it's been just a blank sheet of printing paper shut up in a lightproof 
[p. 239]
envelope; now it has a function, an image, a certainty. We slide the photo quickly into the tray of fixer to secure that clear, 
vulnerable moment, to make the image harder, unchippable, solid for at least a few years. But what if you plunge it into the 
fixer and the chemical doesn't work? This progress, this amorous motion you feel, might refuse to stabilize. Have you seen a 
picture go on relentlessly developing until its whole surface is black, its celebratory moment obliterated? 
Is it normal, this state of love, or abnormal? Statistically, of course, it's abnormal. In a wedding photograph, the interesting 
faces are not those of the bride and groom, but of the encircling guests: the bride's younger sister (will it happen to me, the 
tremendous thing?), the groom's elder brother (will she let him down like that bitch did me?), the bride's mother (how it takes 
me back), the groom's father (if the lad knew what I know now - if only I'd known what I know now), the priest (strange how 
even the tongue-tied are moved to eloquence by these ancient vows), the scowling adolescent (what do they want to get