Please Explain Please Explain Please

Every man might have a winter he holds secret to himself, a night so cold the ears of cattle brittle and break, a vast dark he can only cross as men cross from the barn to the house in a blizzard: by holding to a rope stretched between certainties.

When I say barn, I mean his outward face. When I say the house, the rooms collapse and the whole thing folds flat. If I knew a man and he had a face underneath the face I knew, if he had the potential in him for deeds done best not at all and I didn’t see that face—am I to blame that the openings on my own mask were too small to see through? No, I don’t know what the rope is made of.