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4月12日 Call This LamentA literature lover is miserable, pathetic.
A literature lover is never here, she is always somewhere else. She yearns to go out and see the beautiful world, yet something keeps reminding her that no matter where she goes, this world would never be as beautiful and lovely as she feels it to be: her world only exist on a piece of paper, in a fanciful mind, as an ideal that is too flawless to be tolerated in reality.
She enjoys every advantage the modern age has brought her: liberty, freedom, equal rights with men (almost), a chance of higher education, opportunities for competition, fast transportation, abundant information, the Internet, computer, iPod…Yet in her heart of hearts, she does not really feel that she belongs. She clings stubbornly and desperately to another set of values, another form of culture, another stage of civilization, all of which belong to an era that has gone by—nay, worse—an era that is just an illusion, an era when gentlemen bow and ladies curtsy; when it takes forever to rattle from a place to another in a horse carriage; when classical music is popular music; when the sky is always azure and the valley green; when a boy would overlook five years of grudge and hostility and persists in the pursuit of friendship and love; when a man, his dignity mortified, his heart sighing, aching, and bleeding, touches his hat and politely wishes the object of his love a good day and happiness, after his proposal has been turned down; when old ladies spend an entire sunny afternoon on the front porch, sipping tea, drinking in the scenery that is both at once familiar and new, exchanging country gossip; when the school house hides in the heart of a wood, and leaves rustle, birds sing while the teacher goes on and on about Latin and Greek; when going to school is a sheer delight in the prospect of feeding the mind and the soul; when houses are no more than three stories high and every family has a skylight into which stars on the velvety sky beams and giggles; when there is always someone other than a parent—a sister, a bosom friend, a real chum, an understanding elderly aunt—to listen to one’s rapture and delight, sorrow and woe, tittles and tattles; when everything is just as it should be.
She knows that she is being silly and tries to put a stop to this nonsense, but in vain. She has ever so many sublime visions in her mind, they dance around as soon as she loses grip. One minute she sees green fields, another it is the roaring sea. One minute she smells the apples of autumn, another it is daffodils in spring. Her heart leaps up when she behold horses galloping on the greens, flocks grazing, birds chirping, bees buzzing, and a brook laughing gaily through. One minute she is amused to see a furious girl slams a slate over a boy’s head for teasing about her appearance, vowing she would never ever ever so much as to look at him again, another she delights in watching them, as blossoming young man and woman, walking down the woods hand in hand, laughingly recalling that unfortunate slate.
Indulging in these ideals would be delightful, if a sudden vision of herself did not always spring forth. Short-haired, flat-nosed, thin-eyed, large-boned, short and stout, she has not on her a single beautiful feature. True, a girl does not need to look like a goddess to live happily in this world, but she should have at least one nice feature that somehow catches attention and renders her unusual. Mortified, she looks about her for comfort, and finds in dismay that there is always a skyscraper or sort in her horizon, roaring engine within ear shot, and an distinct smell of 21st century in the air she breathes. And she suddenly remembers with a pang of heart that the only boy she has vowed never to speak to again is utterly spoilt, selfish, and dumb…besides, he looks grotesque. Thus, she sighs a little sigh, and retreats again into the brighter side of her mind, stays there as long as she can, until reality tries once again to stare her in the face
Though publicly scorning it, secretly she longs for a taste of romance—how can she not be, when she has witness its sweetness and glory in the other world. Not that she is a hypocrite, but that she believes in romance as an ideal, a Raphael painting protected behind a glass, Mozart’s own ending for the Requiem, something that is somehow unearthly in its earthliness—or is it the other way around? The 21st century version of romance, the campus version of romance all about her, are an insult to the things she holds dear deep down in a corner of her soul. She tosses her head at every boy she meets. Alas, when is she going to meet someone who is irresistibly handsome, incredibly talented, bewitchingly humorous, amazingly warm, wonderously patient, impossibly patient, who plays the piano or the violin or the cello or the harp—no, she should be the one playing the harp—like a maestro, who reads Wordsworth when he is in a poetic mood, A. E. Houseman when in a happy mood, and Tennyson when he is in a dramatic mood, who takes in delight in nature as much as she does and never tire of rambling in the woods, who…But of course, no such person lives on this version of the world. And even if he does, why should he look at her?
Her closest friends are in her mind, characters that comes to life at her imagination. This is not to say she has no real life bosom friends. She has, three. But they are scattered around country, miles away from her, too busy for minute-to-minute conversation. So she makes friends with those that will always be with her, night and day, sleeping or awake, friends that squeeze onto a bus with her, attend class with her, stroll along the river bank with her, with her, forever with her; friends that speak another language, know a different society, brought up for a different purpose, yet have the same desire and imagination, the same taste, the same likes and dislikes, loves and hates; friends that are literature lovers as well, but are privileged to live in literature all their lives.
Sulkily she views her own situation. She cannot live in literature…unless she starts writing, but she does not have the talent or creativity when it comes to that. Or…she might go into the show business. Film industry is earthy, infamous, chaotic, scandalous, demanding, but then she would really get the chance to outlive reality once in a while—quite often once in a while. Yet…her acting skills are just as disastrous as her looks.
If she could, she would dearly love to be something else other than a living human being. She would love to be a book. No, that would be too ambitious. She would be joyous at just being a page in a book, the page where Elizabeth teases Mr. Darcy in the ball, or where Mr. Thornton clasps Margaret to his heart, or where Anne finally makes up with Gilbert, or where Huck and Jim argues about the French language, or where Bertie messes up everyone’s life. No, that would still be asking too much. She could be content with just being a letter in a word…in a name…an e perhaps, or an l, or a z. …But of course, she could not chose.
A literature lover, thus, spends her life shedding many an invisible tear. There is no escape for her, as one can outgrow a fairytale, but never a novel. Outwardly she may be no different from anyone else, though occasionally she might seem a little dreamy. Yet inwardly…she is unreal herself. |
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