The Heart of the Matter

I'm a sucker for a Graham Greene novel; they're full of religion, foreign wars, and personal conflict. The Heart of the Matter is all of those things peppered with rugged cocktails, dead cockroaches, and shady Algerians running a black market. The main protagonist is Scobie, a British man working in Africa during WWII. He's married and his wife, Louise, is justly unhappy: their only child, a daughter, is dead, Scobie was passed up for promotion, Louise doesn't fit in or like Sierra Leone, and is disconnected from people who share her obsessions of poetry and Catholicism. So she sails to South Africa, a place she thinks she will be happy, to wait three years for her husband to retire and join her.

After Louise leaves Scobie meets a young, beautiful widow and they have an affair. In time the young woman is just as unhappy and bitter as Louise before she left. It seems curious. And Scobie theorizes that this is what happens to women who spend time with him. Somehow, unintentionally, he trains women to feel old, angry, and combative. It's a depressing thought, but probably accurate. I think about it a lot and try to notice how my actions mold the people around me and also how my friends affect my personality.

My situation this deployment is similar to the last; I'm working primarily with one junior guy and we spend most of our time surveying together during the day. And just like last year my partner in crime isn't speedy with the math but I see him improving and it makes me feel good. I'm noticing other things too: he's usually in a good mood and cracks funny jokes, he's a hard worker, intensely loyal, and confides in me easily. It was the same last year and it makes me feel very lucky. But sometimes when I think about it in the context of that Graham Greene novel, I let myself think that maybe I bring out those characteristics in people. And that makes me feel like I'm both doing something right and that my time in the Navy has been worth the headaches. I don't think this education is found anywhere else.