A Severe Mercy: A Story of Faith, Tragedy and Triumph

“That nameless something that had stopped his heart was Beauty. Even now, for him, ‘bare branches against the stars’ was a synonym for beauty.”

The appreciation of beauty is a throughline woven throughout the book. From the author’s very early childhood experience of beauty in nature, looking at the forest and the stars at night, all the way through his relationship with Davy and their mutual desire for the beautiful, to the author’s experience of suffering grief at Davy’s death as a kind of mercy, the search for beauty remained. Even after Davy’s death, the night sky remained a source of wonder, as related in the opening chapter.

“If there were a choice—and he suspected there was—a choice between, on the one hand, the heights and the depths and, on the other hand, some sort of safe, cautious middle way, he, for one, here and now chose the heights and the depths.”

Contemplating the difference between living a life devoted to constantly plying the middle road and plotting out as safe a course as possible, Van is able to choose—even as a young boy—the life of adventure and risk. In context, he is considering the general difference between how young boys and girls experience life and interact with their own emotions, and he comes to wonder if somehow girls get more out of life by considering their emotions. This pushes him to the conviction that even though a life beholden to the joys and pains of emotion will not be a steady one, it will be one much more worth living.