How do you know if your Eureka moments are real?
Reading Lucy Gayheart through neuroscience
When I last wrote about the potential sources of epiphany and how to maximize the conditions for those creative breakthroughs, my text was Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark, in which Thea Kronborg rises from a suffocating rural environment to the height of celebrity and acclaim as an opera star. Part VI, the final section of the novel, is titled “Kronborg.” The little girl with the big voice has been replaced by her stage persona, the way Paul David Hewson is now known as Bono.
As inspiring as Thea Kronborg’s story is, I find that I don’t relate to her much. Cather wrote, in a 1932 preface to the novel, that Thea “seemed wholly at the mercy of accident; but to persons of her vitality and honesty, fortunate accidents always happen.” Good for her, but a lot of us are all too aware of the other kinds of accidents that happen, even to people of vitality and honesty. And I think we know that “fortunate accident” is sometimes another word for privilege.
The novel that I return to more often at this stage of my life, when I often feel more like Thea’s broken-down piano teacher than like an artist on the rise, is Lucy Gayheart. Lucy comes of age in a little Nebraska town, and she shares all of Thea’s hunger for awakening. But she can never seem to break through. For decades she has been read as the poster girl for dependency and fragility. A pitiable example of failed epiphany, or what neuroscientists call “pseudo-insight.”
Joseph Urgo wrote perhaps the most devastating statement about Lucy that I have ever read: “Cather makes it impossible to read anything less than disappointment out of the character. By all standards Lucy Gayheart is a limited young woman, not the stuff into which inspiration is embodied.”
Why on earth would I keep coming back to this novel, if the protagonist is so pathetic? Because I reject the premise. Where some see failure, I see resilience. I see myself in Lucy Gayheart — not because I feel doomed, but because I believe she actually found a path through her brokenness. Her vision of embracing life itself as a lover, rather than depending on others to fill that void, is still a good vision to live by.
Reader be advised: My students were always aghast that literary criticism included so many plot spoilers. I’m going to cover most of the major plot points in Lucy Gayheart in this post, and if that offends your sensibilities, you might want to revisit today’s essay after finishing the novel. However, my goal with this Substack is to write accessibly enough that anyone, regardless of whether they’ve read my primary texts, can follow along. And the novel is so rich that I won’t have spoiled it if you pick it up knowing how it ends, anymore than I could ruin one of Chopin’s preludes by describing it to you.
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To understand Lucy, you have to know about Harry Gordon. Lucy and Harry both grow up in a Nebraska hamlet called Haverford. They are more friends than sweethearts, but their early days read like the prelude to a love story.
In one of those scenes, Lucy returns for the Christmas holiday from Chicago, where she has been studying piano, and joins a crowd of young people who are ice skating on the Platte River. Harry Gordon arrives some time later and spots Lucy in the crowd. Harry is a strapping young man, the best pitcher on the town’s baseball team, and a rising star in business. He throws on his skates and speeds out to offer Lucy his arm, and they skate off alone to a little island where they watch the sun set.
“The round red sun was falling like a heavy weight; it touched the horizon line and sent quivering fans of red and gold over the wide country. For a moment Lucy and Harry Gordon were sitting in a stream of blinding light; it burned on their skates… Their faces became so brilliant that they looked at each other and laughed.”
As twilight falls, Harry and Lucy skate back across the river, and Harry drives Lucy home in his sleigh. It’s almost too romantic (he literally has sleigh bells). And that may well be Cather’s point, because she sets up another moment that nearly everyone has read as a failed epiphany.
“The sleigh was such a tiny moving spot on that still white country settling into shadow and silence. Suddenly Lucy started and struggled under the tight blankets. In the darkening sky she had seen the first star come out; it brought her heart into her throat. That point of silver light spoke to her like a signal, released another kind of life and feeling which did not belong here. It overpowered her. With a mere thought she had reached that star and it had answered, recognition had flashed between. Something knew, then, in the unknowing waste: something had always known, forever! That joy of saluting what is far above one was an eternal thing, not merely something that had happened to her ignorance and her foolish heart. The flash of understanding lasted but a moment. Then everything was confused again. Lucy shut her eyes and leaned on Harry’s shoulder to escape from what she had gone so far to snatch. It was too bright and too sharp. It hurt, and made one feel small and lost.”
Lucy can’t hold onto that vision. Even worse, she has to lean on Harry for comfort. Many readers see Lucy’s confusion and self-doubt here as a sign that her creative imagination is weak. She might want to be an artist, but she’ll never get there. Doesn’t have the stuff.
But I see a hunger so strong it cannot be denied. If the starlight vision is incomplete, it is a momentary setback in Lucy’s growth: what neuroscientists call a cognitive impasse. But even geniuses hit brick walls. That is no sign of failure. The question is whether Lucy ever makes the leap to insight.
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I won’t review all of the research I included in the earlier post, but this diagram might help capture much of it. I’ve adapted it from The Eureka Factor by John Kounios and Mark Beeman. The short explanation is that epiphany begins with immersion in a problem — a conundrum that must be resolved or a question that must be answered. If the answer doesn’t come right away, you hit the impasse. Some people keep banging against the impasse, thinking they can grind their way to enlightenment, but Kounios and Beeman explain that diversion can actually be helpful. Diversion creates space for a revelation that has been incubating below the level of consciousness to break through.
Medical shows flog this trope all the time. Greg House, of House, M.D., seems like he has ADHD because he’s constantly distracted by a bouncy ball in his office or a shiny new motorcycle, but often it’s the diversity of his interests that helps him crack difficult diagnoses. Sherlock Holmes is the same: a man of quirky interests and vices that directly benefit his deductive reasoning, either by coincidence or because he knows some arcane thing about snakes that snaps all the clues together. You might even say that curanderos and shamans rely on a similarly non-linear method for healing. A sweat ceremony represents many things, some of them known only to a tribal community, but it fits this idea of enabling awakening by withdrawing from the world into a darkened lodge, simplifying the sensory response to heat and sound, and emerging from that symbolic womb reborn.
So just because Lucy doesn’t experience a breakthrough right away doesn’t mean she never will. She’s still immersed in her hunger, bouncing off the impasse back into immersion or diversion. And she carries her yearning for what Cather describes as a “fugitive gleam” back to Chicago after that Christmas holiday. This is how it is with artists. The cognitive problem is almost always an existential one.
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To understand Lucy, you also have to know about Clement Sebastian. Sebastian is a Pavarotti of sorts in Cather’s novel. Lucy sees him perform one night in Chicago and is so moved that she later becomes his accompanist and lover. This power differential between the older singer and his young paramour has inspired comparisons between Sebastian and Dracula — many feminist scholars see him as a predator. Indeed, even though Lucy is a consenting adult living in her own apartment, it’s almost impossible to read the story any other way through the sensibilities of our time.
But Lucy does not understand her relationship to Sebastian in this way. That twilight scene in Harry’s sleigh? It happened three months after Lucy first heard Sebastian sing, when she felt that he had awakened something in her. Instead of draining the life from her like a vampire, Sebastian seems to be giving her something that she needs: access to beauty and the transport that we all feel when great art lifts us out of our individual limitations into the timeless and eternal. He makes her believe that she can salute the heavens and expect a reply.
If you think I’m making that up, listen to what Lucy says after Sebastian dies in a drowning accident while touring in Europe. It sounds like genuine grief.
“To have one’s heart frozen and one’s world destroyed in a moment—that was what it had meant. She could not draw a long breath or make a free movement in the world that was left. She could breathe only in the world she brought back through memory.”
Lucy feels frozen in the world because she has come to see Chicago through her relationship to Sebastian. Her Chicago is a “city of feeling [that] rose out of the city of fact like a definite composition, — beautiful because the rest was blotted out.” I know how this feels — to understand a place through your loneliness or your joy. It’s why I can’t picture the Lochsa River in Idaho without hearing Emmylou Harris singing “Wrecking Ball.” And also why the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northern Minnesota, where I have made some of my happiest memories, plays in my heart to the tune of Van Morrison’s “Brand New Day.”
And so when her lover and mentor dies, Lucy feels she can’t stay in the city. It’s not the same place. She doesn’t know where she is anymore.
But Lucy can’t go home very easily because of Harry. If you hadn’t guessed already, Harry always thought he would marry Lucy, and so he visits her from time to time in Chicago. During one of those visits he proposes to her over dinner. But she doesn’t want to be a housewife in Nowhere Nebraska. She tells Harry that she’s in love with Sebastian, and when he misinterprets this as a crush (Cather describes him as “glowing with tolerance”), Lucy tells him that she’s gone “all the way” with Sebastian. That isn’t literally true at that point in the story, but it gets Harry’s attention. He pays the bill, walks out without saying goodbye, and skedaddles back to Haverford. So that’s what Lucy has to deal with when she goes home.
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Lucy doesn’t belong in Haverford anymore, but her personal Chicago also vanishes when Sebastian drowns. The existential problem changes. She’d found the thing she was hungering for, but it was taken away. Presumably that world might still exist out there somewhere, but she doesn’t know where. If you have followed this series, you’ll recognize echoes in Lucy of my thoughts on losing a calling — not because it was no longer the thing I was born to do, but because the environment where I might live out that passion was slowly dying. So I relate to Lucy here. I’d love nothing more than to find myself in a classroom again. I know that what I experienced there for a time was real. But, at least for now, the opportunity to practice teaching harmoniously — the way Lucy felt while accompanying Sebastian — is gone.
Like me, Lucy really has no choice but to start over. Now her existential struggle is how to live without it. Lucy’s father, Jacob Gayheart, is a watchmaker in Haverford, and her sister Pauline keeps his books for him while managing a side business selling onions. So Lucy comes home to live with them.
But childhood homes are not always safe places, and Lucy feels she must guard herself from “something that was trying to snatch away her beautiful memories, to make her believe they were illusions and had never been anything else.” Rural hometowns have a brutal way of cutting you down to size, making you feel small despite what you have accomplished in the wide world.
When Lucy can’t unclench in her family home, she seeks refuge in the apple orchard. The orchard has been neglected so long that nobody harvests the fruit any longer. So even if it is not a wilderness, it offers a freedom that Lucy can’t find anywhere else. “There is something comforting to the heart,” Cather writes, “in the shapes of old apple trees that have been left to grow their own way.” The weight of social judgment is lifted there, and Lucy feels she can “remember and think, and try to realize what had happened to her.”
To Pauline and the rest of Haverford, Lucy is a failure. Her little pipe dream of being an artist in Chicago has burst. And she spurned the only real chance she had at marriage with the most eligible bachelor in town at the time. She got too big for her britches, and everyone pities her. Whatever power she felt when she turned Harry down in the Chicago restaurant is gone. He owns the local bank and will barely acknowledge her on the street.
But Lucy isn’t done yet. When an opera company travels to Haverford for a performance of The Bohemian Girl, Lucy accompanies her father as a favor to him. Lucy has been dead inside, but as she listens to the soprano — an older woman whose voice is well past its prime — “a wild kind of excitement flared up in her.” This singer is still performing despite her obvious decline. Lucy knows she has to find her way “back to a world that [strives] after excellence—the world out of which this woman must have fallen.” Cather writes, “The wandering singer had struck something in her that went on vibrating; something that was like a purpose forming, and she could not stop it. When she awoke in the morning, it was still there, beating like another heart.”
Lucy carries this feeling with her through her family’s Christmas preparations until one night when Pauline suggests that she rest a while before dinner. Up in her room, gazing out the window at twilight, Lucy thinks of Sebastian, how he had taught her to trust her hunger. The “fugitive gleam” that she couldn’t hold onto in that sleigh ride with Harry became an “actual possession” with Sebastian in Chicago. And this was not something Sebastian gave directly to her — it was a self-discovery that he made possible: “With him she had learned that those flashes of promise could come true, that they could be the important things in one’s life.”
In my essay on The Song of the Lark, I explained how to optimize the conditions for epiphany. Dulling the senses makes space for thoughts to assert themselves. Turning away from the cognitive problem toward something like a traveling opera show can also allow insight to break through. And placing oneself in an environment like a second-floor bedroom with a long sightline expands the range of creative associations. Each of these help prime Lucy for epiphany. Her memories of Sebastian and the winter scene outside her window converge:
“Suddenly something flashed into her mind, so clear that it must have come from without, from the breathless quiet. What if—what if Life itself were the sweetheart? It was like a lover waiting for her in distant cities — across the sea; drawing her, enticing her, weaving a spell over her…. Oh, now she knew! She must have it, she couldn’t run away from it. She must go back into the world and get all she could of everything that had made him what he was. Those splendours were still on earth, to be sought after and fought for.”
I have never been what I’d call clinically depressed, but I have been laid low by grief. And so I can attest to the staying power of Lucy’s message here. How do we pick ourselves back up and keep putting one leaden foot in front of the other? Because we focus on reasons for living. And if we lose someone dear to us, we know that the way to honor them is to get off the couch and make them proud. My grandmother was an anchor in my life when she died in August 2021, and she is still a guiding light. She weathered so much hardship to become the woman I loved. Whatever made her that strong can also fortify me.
But Lucy never gets a chance to live out this vision. While Lucy is making plans to return to Chicago as a piano instructor, Pauline shares a rumor running around Haverford about how Harry ditched Lucy as soon as he knew about her affair with Sebastian. There’s some truth to it, but it’s not the whole story, and the pettiness of it makes Lucy angry. She decides to hike a few miles to the Platte River and skate out her frustration. But it is cold and windy, and the ruts in the road are bad. Lucy hears Harry’s sleigh bells coming up behind her, when he overtakes her she asks for a lift. He makes an excuse, feigning politeness, and leaves her alone in the road. Lucy is so angry that she forgets all about the cold, pushes forward into the wind, and laces up her skates as she’d planned.
One tricky thing about the Platte River is that it’s always changing course as its sandbars erode during spring flooding, and so Lucy has lost track of where the main channel now flows beneath the ice. She skates out over the deep water, thinking about how she will “get away from [the] frozen country and frozen people” and reclaim the “light and freedom” of her new philosophy. But the ice can’t hold, and when she goes under, her skate catches on a submerged tree. Which is where Lucy’s father and several neighbors find her later that evening.
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It is a sad way for Lucy’s story to end, but I don’t read it the way other people do. The standard line is that this is what happens to people like Lucy who lack Thea Kronborg’s honesty and vitality. According to this reasoning, Lucy just can’t go the distance. She is an escapist, living in a world of make-believe. She needs to grow up, get over herself, come back to earth. Refusing to do so just ups the odds of those tragic accidents. Thea, by contrast, has both the will and the resilience to make her dreams come true.1
But I see Lucy moving toward a growth mindset near the end of the novel. So what if she’ll never get rich teaching piano in Chicago? She can’t persuade herself to love a life in Haverford that other people think is the best she can reasonably expect. She accepts the risks of independence because that is the only way she can embrace life itself as a sweetheart. She is not willing to let others define her feelings for her.
Some say that she isn’t strong enough to control her emotions in the end, that she is so blinded by anger at Harry that she doesn’t look closely enough at the river and the ice. But this is what makes me love Lucy’s character. I don’t think she deserves to die for being mad at Harry. She is being honest with herself. Plus, the hike and the skate are healthy impulses — a little self-care in the face of town gossip. Better than cowering away from those petty judgements.
No, I can’t see Lucy as a failure. A friend of mine from Montana lost an arm in a logging accident through no fault of his own. Sometimes the dead tree leaning against the branches of the one you’re cutting down falls swiftly and silently. That’s why loggers call them widow makers, and you only have to miss one to pay the price. My uncle was shot on his own property by bear hunters and survived. Not his fault. My father once fell from a ladder in the middle of winter after cleaning our chimney and broke both of his wrists on the frozen ground. What use would there have been in scolding him for taking chances (if he was)? You can try to keep an eye out for these things, but you can’t see every accident coming. Sometimes you skate out onto thin ice unawares, and by the time you hear the crack there is nothing to be done.
But that doesn’t mean Lucy’s vision of freedom and light isn’t true.
If you missed the Friday essay by
at , you’ll want to give it a look. Russell writes about the “New Now” in an affirming meditation on our tumultuous times.A close look at Thea Kronborg’s transformation in Panther Canyon shows a curious mingling of the real and the imaginary. She draws strength both from concrete things, like sun-warmed rock and a desert stream, but she also imagines herself capable of understanding the Anasazi women who carried water from the river up to their cliff dwellings in earthen jars. Sarah Clere rightly pegs this as “playing Indian.” And so I wonder how honest Thea really is. Even after she’s returned to New York and found success on the stage, she imagines a kinship with the Anasazi that is pure fiction. Lucy never does that.
This is good