King of Hearts

He has thrown open every door of his house and calls it strength. A Roman paterfamilias measured his standing by what he could give away at table — the fuller the feast, the surer the man — and this King has inherited that arithmetic completely. His heart is Jung's puer grown into a throne: warmth without calculation, welcome without a guest list. What he has not yet learned is the old joke about security — that the tighter you grip a good feeling, hoping to keep it, the faster it slips through the hand doing the gripping. He is not grasping here. He is spending. But even spending can become a performance for an audience of one, and the shadow waiting behind all this open-handed warmth is a man quietly falling in love with his own generosity — a host who has started attending his own banquet as its most honored guest.