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From Stephen and Thomas Amidon’s The Sublime Engine (in stock):

No matter how hard he tries, he cannot ignore the realization that this thing he holds in his hand is not transcendent at all. It is small and negligible. Viscid and shriveled. Charred and oozing.

It is ugly. Ugly and dead.

By the time he arrives in Pisa, he has manged to banish these troubling thoughts from his mind. He goes immediately to see Mary. This is his mission now, to give Shelley’s immortal beloved her husband’s miraculously intact heart. He is greeted by her friend Andrea Vaccà Berlinghieri, a professor of anatomy at the local university, who explains that the widow is resting in her bedroom. As they wait for her to be summoned, Trelawny shows the doctor the poet’s heart and describes how it survived the intense heat of the pyre. Berlinghieri is less impressed than Trelawny had hoped. He responds, almost casually, that the heart is a particularly durable muscle. And in cases of suffocation, it becomes engorged with blood before death, which would have allowed it to resist the conflagration. Trelawny dismisses his remarks as a characteristic of a man of science, a fact lover who has never experienced sublimity. The doctor seems more interested in the skull, remarking that he has never seen one so extraordinarily thin. Mary Shelley overhears this last remark as she enters. In deference to the widow, Berlinghieri adds that this is no doubt due to the unique sensitivity of the brain it contained.

After describing the extraordinary events at the beach ceremony, Trelawny then presents Mrs. Shelley with the poet’s heart. Her reaction is not what he expects. The author of Frankenstein looks at it with terror and disgust. She gestures for him to remove it from her sight, looking for a moment as if she might even swoon. Then, in a weak voice, she asks that it immediately be taken with her husband’s remains to Rome to be buried in the Protestant Cemetery, according to his wishes. Trelawny, remembering the recent miscarriage that had sent Shelley to sea and his doom, understands that giving her the heart might not have been the flamboyantly gracious gesture that he had intended. He readily agrees to her request, though he will disobey her in one regard: he will keep possession of the heart. He does not have it buried. Later, when the storm of emotions has passed, he sends it to her. This time she does not reject it. And in fact, she keeps it in her desk until the day of her death, though it is doubtful that she ever takes it from the box.

A captivating, polyvalent look at the human heart, The Sublime Engine thumps and pulses just like its star.

On Saturday, Feb 19th: Stephen Amidon and Thomas Amidon read from The Sublime Engine. Here. 7 pm.