Faith & Spirit Quote by Josephine Hart

Hart’s line treats inner life the way her fiction treats desire: as something both intensely private and stubbornly physical. An “eternal landscape” is a striking contradiction. Landscapes change; eternity doesn’t. The friction is the point. She’s arguing that the self has terrain - ridges of fear, valleys of longing, fault lines of grief - that feels permanent even as we keep revisiting it in different weather. “Geography” also implies mapping, and mapping implies partial knowledge: outlines, borders, approximations. You don’t “solve” a landscape; you learn how to move through it.

The subtext is an ambivalent consolation. If the soul has a geography, then our confusions aren’t random; they belong to a larger shape. But Hart refuses the neat comfort of discovery. We “search for its outlines all our lives,” not its center, not its treasure. Outlines are what you see from a distance, or in low light. That’s a very Hart move: intimacy rendered as obsession, clarity always just out of reach. It suggests that self-understanding is less epiphany than repeated reconnaissance - relationships, failures, art, and memory acting like expeditions that return with new sketches, never the final map.

Contextually, coming from a writer attuned to the humiliations of passion and the stories we tell ourselves to survive it, the quote reads as a rebuke to quick-fix selfhood. The soul isn’t a brand to curate; it’s a terrain to navigate, and the navigation is the life.