Aristotle and Dante Dive Into the Waters of the World

“Aristotle Mendoza was not born to wear glasses.”

“Apparently, Aristotle Mendoza’s eyes do not agree.”

I know I don’t know much about love—but what I know about love, my mother and Dante taught me.”

And I was starting to discover that change didn’t just happen—I had to make it happen

If we’re lucky. If we’re very lucky, the universe will send us the people we need to survive.

I remembered Dante on his bed, and me sitting on his big chair as he read the definition for that word from his well-worn dictionary: Calm, peaceful, untroubled, tranquil. “We’re done for, Ari,” he’d said. “Neither one of us are any of those things.”

Poems do not belong on a painting. And I do not belong in this world

The earth does not know the word “exile.” Violence begins in the dark and stubborn riots of the human heart. The human heart is the source of all our hate—and all our love. We must tame our wild hearts—or we will never understand the spark of the universe that lives within us all.

To live and never to understand the strange and beautiful mysteries of the human heart is to make a tragedy of our lives.

Pain and joy and anger and life and death—everything present all at once—everything reflected in the faces of the people in this room, people I had come to love even as I didn’t understand love at all. I remembered reading one of the letters that my aunt Ophelia wrote to my mother, and she’d written: God has no face but yours. God has no face but mine.

“You know, we not only have to be smart enough to be cartographers—we also have to be brave enough to dive into waters that may not be very friendly.”

She looked me—to make sure I was listening. “We can do this. One of these days the world is going to be very surprised by the things we accomplish. But we won’t be. We won’t be surprised at all. Because we will have learned by then what we have in us.”

I used to think of love as only something intimate that happened between two people. I was wrong about that.