Sometime back I was asked to make a certain list of literary works. There may not be a more appropriate date to post my list. There is no man without bias. My list is biased too. And as someone wrote somewhere; it’s not for the happy souls alone, it’s also for the bitter hearts who hate all those happy souls.
As a restless ten year old; how one wished to be up and away?
Far from the hustle and bustle on the ground and to be
Up in the Tree“The secret of their being up in the tree had continued for almost two years now. Where the thick trunk branched out near the top, the two could sit comfortably. Michiko, straddling one branch, leaned back against another. There were days when little birds came and days when the wind sang through the pine needles. Although they weren’t that high off the ground, these two little lovers felt as if they were in a completely different world, far away from the earth.”
14.
Kawabata Yasunari, the ultimate Zen master of the unrequited lovers
An accidental brush with the
War and Peace at an unacceptably young age might leave one with all the ‘wrong’ notions;
“Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly…..Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.”
13.
Lyev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, the literary titan of the multiple master pieces
The conscious search that follows could bring in
Romeo Montague and
Juliet Capulet,
“Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs, Being purged, the fire in lovers’ eyes, Being vexed, a sea nourished with lovers’ tears. What is it? A madness most discreet, A choking gall and a preserving sweet.”
12.
William Shakespeare, the wizard of verse and prose
It’s when one ceases to be so young, but not old enough to be counted among the adults that one gets all the idealistic ideas and encounter the uncertainties of
First Love“I had ceased to be simply a young boy; I was someone in love.”
11.
Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, one of the greatest artists in depicting complex young minds
Around the same time the naughty thoughts may creep into one's mind instigated by
Cyrano de Bergerac“A kiss, when all is said, what is it? An oath that's ratified, a sealed promise, A heart's avowal claiming confirmation, A rose-dot on the ‘I’ of ‘adoration’; A secret that to mouth, not ear, is whispered…”
10.
Edmond Eugene Alexis Rostand, the man who gave young men the 'panache'
And then
The Kiss finally arrives!!
“When he went back into the drawing-room his heart was beating and his hands were trembling so noticeably that he made haste to hide them behind his back... he gave himself up entirely to the new sensation which he had never experienced before in his life. Something strange was happening to him.. His neck, round which soft, fragrant arms had so lately been clasped, seemed to him to be anointed with oil; on his left cheek near his moustache where the unknown had kissed him there was a faint chilly tingling sensation as from peppermint drops, and the more he rubbed the place the more distinct was the chilly sensation; all over, from head to foot, he was full of a strange new feeling which grew stronger and stronger... He wanted to dance, to talk, to run into the garden, to laugh aloud…He quite forgot that he was round-shouldered and uninteresting, that he had lynx-like whiskers and an "undistinguished appearance"”
09.
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, the artist who tossed the questions around in a stream of consciousness
And then one day with another book, one may come of age and imagine how it will be to be in love with a girl like, say
Jane Eyre?
“I was dazzled, stimulated: my senses were excited; and being ignorant, raw, and inexperienced, I thought I loved her. There is no folly so besotted that the idiotic rivalries of society, the prurience, the rashness, the blindness of youth, will not hurry a man to its commission.”
08.
Charlotte Bronte, the eldest of the Brontes
..and it refuses to die down, no matter what the surrounding. It’s like to be in
Love in the Time of Cholera“To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else's heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.”
07.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Marquess of the Magical Realism
… then comes the period of
Great Expectations about love and life:
“According to my experience, the conventional notion of a lover cannot be always true. The unqualified truth is that, that when I loved Estella with the love of a man, I loved her simply because I found her irresistible. Once for all; I knew to my sorrow, often and often, if not always, that I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be. Once for all; I loved her none the less because I knew it, and it had no more influence in restraining me, than if I had devoutly believed her to be human perfection”
06.
Charles John Huffam Dickens, the Boz of the English novel
One can not go on like that forever as if on a
Blind man's Holiday!
“Man is too thoroughly an egoist not to be also an egotist; if he love, the object shall know it. During a lifetime he may conceal it through stress of expediency and honour, but it shall bubble from his dying lips, though it disrupt a neighbourhood. It is known, however, that most men do not wait so long to disclose their passion.”
05.
O. Henry aka William Sydney Porter, the writer with the Gift of the Magi
And then one is brought back into the realities, to be face to face with one's shadow and empathize with the Hunchback of Notredam:
Love is like a tree, it grows of its own accord, it puts down deep roots into our whole being......Oh! love!... That is to be two and to be but one. A man and a woman mingled into one angel. It is heaven.
04.
Victor-Marie Hugo, the author of the
greatest novel ever written!
… then comes the nightmares......with The Pearl as a child and
East of Eden as an adult!!
“In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror.”
03.
John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr., for making one believe in the perfectibility of man
And may
The Sorrows of Young Werther remain his alone......for
“I have been more than once intoxicated, my passions have always bordered on extravagance: I am not ashamed to confess it; for I have learned, by my own experience, that all extraordinary men, who have accomplished great and astonishing actions, have ever been decried by the world as drunken or insane.”
02.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the genius who also wrote novels
Finally signing off with the
White Nights on the White Day with apologies for the vices...
“For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments. And all the time your soul is craving and longing for something else. And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking in these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him!”
01.
Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky, the embittered voice of the '
underground man'
