A harbour in the tempest
A love letter to five words from All I Want Is You by U2
The highest form of trust is when you expose your most vulnerable self to another person. This is a sacred gift. You reveal your deepest shame. You confess to your unworthiness. You admit to your detestable weakness. You share things that can be used against you. You place in their hands the specific isotope of Kryptonite that can end your days. Your trustee becomes a Horcrux. Part of your soul is invested in them. Part of your soul dies if this trust is betrayed.
I think of these things when I hear this lyric.
A harbour in the tempest
The first thing you learn at boarding school is not to show weakness. On day one, I observed an act of low-level violence being inflicted by a bigger boy on a smaller member of the house. The victim didn’t flinch. He said, “That was nice. Please do it again.” No weakness was shown, the bully lost interest, and life moved on. I remember thinking, “Ah, so that’s how it works here.”
Unlike the state school I’d attended until the age of 16, there is no respite at a boarding school. If there’s trouble, you can’t walk away from it at half past three. Your house master or mistress is your legal guardian, but it’s a transactional role with none of the emotional depth of parenting. You need exceptionally good friends. And, for all its faults, boarding school is a breeding ground for these.
In actual fact, random acts of physical violence were uncommon. But there was a heavy risk attached to emotional vulnerability. That’s the true tyranny of these establishments. Any public show of sadness or loneliness, any obvious lack of confidence, any kind of suspect emotional tell, was a scab to be picked or a bruise to be pressed, over and over and over. Without a trusted outlet for your feelings, the only coping strategies are the dangerous repression of intense emotions and a smokescreen of bluster. In other words, a permanently stressful existence. In these circumstances, a boarding school becomes a factory turning out broken people.
So trust is everything. No one is permanently invulnerable. Boarding school life is a series of stress-tests on the deepest form of trust between friends. Trust is not an unexamined act of faith, it is a proven fact. Or it’s a quickly revealed falsehood. Friendships that survive these repeated tests assume the strength of blood ties. I met most of my lifelong friends in those two years, including the boy who became my best man.
There is so much saturated meaning in these five words.
A harbour in the tempest
The boy who became my best man turned up unannounced at my house one day. This was remarkable because I lived in Scotland and he lived in Canada. My wife had died and he jumped on the first plane to be with me. Suddenly there he was, having walked the final mile of farm track up to the house. My knees buckled.
He stayed for several weeks. I was awful company — manic, silently screaming, head full of white noise — but I could trust him with the whole truth of the mess I was in. Around him I could relax into the chaos, which relieved the pressure cooker stress of appearing strong and in control for my daughters. He took me to the mountains of Glen Lyon, where we made some hairy ascents on steep ice. Fear is excellent distraction therapy.
A harbour in the tempest
My mother lived with us for nearly a year after my wife died. She picked up the pieces of me. She bathed the house in a pragmatic form of love. There was no fussy sympathy. Her understated compassion was a reassuring background radiation, and our emotional Geiger counters were crackling away full-time. She gave my daughters hugs and structure. Everyone says that life goes on, but she made it so. We survived the winter in our little matriarchal society.
A harbour in the tempest
I wonder how much was invested in these words when they were written. They sit snugly at the end of a stanza of succour. They provide the half-rhyme with blindness and dryness. It’s compact and concentrated. It’s accomplished, mature lyric writing.
You say you’ll give me
Eyes in a moon of blindness
A river in a time of dryness
A harbour in the tempest
But, as ever, lyrics are porous. No matter how precise, how pointed, or how explicit, they have limitless capacity to absorb and assimilate extra meaning from the listener. Soaking up as much grief and compassion and trust and love and friendship and vulnerability as we’re ready to pour into them.
Postscript. I wrote and edited the first draft of this post in January 2022. I fiddled with it on and off in early February. I’m publishing in early March. People in Berlin are welcoming thousands of Ukrainian refugees into their homes. A harbour in the tempest. It’s about more than trust. It’s the definition of humanity.
If you liked this, you might also like Pale Blue Eyes (below).
