The Heart Reader

I met a guy the other day, about my age, went to school with my girlfriend.  He said he had just quit his job not too long ago working for a company that read cardiographs.

People all across the nation go through tests for abnormalities of the heart, and that raw data, all their hours and hours of heartbeats, get sent to this nondescript office building here in Texas.  There, people like this guy spend all day looking at computer screens, reading what information there is to be found in those peaks and valleys.

And this guy, he said he hated being a cardiograph technician.  He said he couldn't stand going to the boring, stuffy office building, sitting in a depressing little cubicle under the harsh florescent lights, staring at a screen for eight hours.  He said that kind of work is not for him.

Now, he works at an organic grocery store in Dallas, making smoothies and sacking kale for yuppies.  He says he is happier.

But if we consider the heart to be the source of all things, the seat of our truest self, I think there is a strange poetry to his former job.  He read, and people in that building continue to read, heartbeats.  As if they were laying their heads on the chest of a stranger a thousand miles away.  Surely the heart is too intimate and powerfully personal to be turned into pure data, just lines on a screen.

But no, it did not hold him.  The divide of the depersonifying computer screen was a gulf too great to be crossed.  He never came to know the people whose hearts he read, except in a superficial medical sense.  He learned, for example, if they suffered from arrhythmia.

But reading a heartbeat does not mean you know someone's heart.  And if the pulsing, unfiltered language of our innermost self is no longer powerful enough to inspire wonder and understanding, how can the black lines of the words I type claim to be worth more?