The Normal Heart
Verse Six
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
September 1, 1939 by W. H. Auden
Every single one of us is not unlike Vaslav Nijinski. This writer is not excepted. Nijinski was regarded as the greatest male ballet dancer of the early 20th century. His magnificent gift was to dance. Yet as with all of us, life became complicated, convoluted. He wanted what he could not have. How easily our desires become misshapen by societies norms and by circumstances. Tainted love. Look up his story. I’ll just say that he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and spent 30 years in and out of asylums. He never danced again in public.
So, this is the “error bred in the bone” as if by genetic inheritance. No one is immune. We desire unequivocally what we decline to share. A Golem muttering, “My precious, my precious!”
