Literature has always intrigued me. And poetry further confused me. Always
tagged as a grammar-nazi
wherever I went, it was hard for me to understand during school why poetry
eluded me so.
While my English teachers endeavored… - no that’s not the British-English
spelling, that’s just the Microsoft-autocorrect taking over my years of prim
and proper Wren-&-Martin education in English grammar! Anyway, while my English
teachers endeavoured everyday to explain the literal and
implied meaning of a Wordsworth or Tagore, I felt there was something whose
core I failed to access. Now, standing at the thirty-fifth year of my life, I discovered that I had
missed in them a kinship to my own feelings and experiences.
The other day, I picked up a copy of Selected Short Stories by Oscar Wilde. I have always been taught
that Oscar Wilde is classic. And just by one short story he answered me why he
was. He had made birds and statues come alive in a way that it almost made me
wonder if I was reading poetry, a fairy tale or just a story. Just a story? No
it’s never just a story! It’s probably someone sitting under a tree lost in
thoughts for hours, looking at the world going around him, drawing a parallel
world in his mind and then penning it down on a piece of paper with accurate,
coherent words or many a times with invented words that make complete sense and
even blow you away. The reader in that moment of his reading lives the story too.
Word by word, page by page! He sits with his book in the corner of his room
where the real world for him has vanished into a haze. Such is the power of a
story. Therefore, it is never just a story.
So then, are you a fact or a fiction-worm? In answering this lies
a difference in orientation, I have observed. When you ask this question to
ardent readers, you will get as clear an answer as when you ask pet-lovers if
they are a cat person or a dog person, or non-vegetarians if they liked their
meatloaf rare or well-done. While there are bi-bingers, more often than not
readers will tell you with certainty what they enjoy reading.
My world of reading as a child was always spun around fairies and
dacoits and kingdoms and neverlands. The stories told by kiplings and brontes of
the world took me to a place far, far away from home. As the eldest child in my
family, I would be put to sleep or be woken up with strange tales of elves and poisoned
apples and true love’s kiss. In contrast, a friend, who likes non-fictions more,
told me he has been through most of his childhood figuring things out as they
are. And in saying so, he reaffirmed my silly little, hypothesis that kids who
do not grow up with hearing these strange tales are more likely to appreciate
non-fiction. Fact-seekers, you are cautioned not to take this as a real foolproof
theory as my sample size of research is really minuscule.
And, this is not to say that the world of non-fiction readers is
any less - less interesting or less engaging. However, fiction-readers like us
are at a real risk of believing in these stories so much so that our locus of
identity lies outside of ourselves -- in the book that we are holding up to our
noses, hiding behind them as if they were clothes that made us invisible. Such
is often the magnetism of literature. On the afternoon of the first monsoons,
people like us cannot not escape into this world. It overwhelms your senses for
anything else.
And now when I read poetry, I understand why my child-mind could
not make complete sense of it. Poetry is closer to spirituality, closer to
expressing a sensation with slaughtering as few words as possible. It is a
certain maturity in literature that can only be attained when you have learnt
to reflect inwards. To appreciate poetry either you go deeper and deeper into
the self or higher and away into the universe. For the poetry-buff, the space
in between the self and the universe is only a chain of incessant events within
a black hole of ethereal solitude. So now when asked that question “which book
would you like to keep if you were to be deserted on an island for years”, I
think it will definitely be The Geeta or a Rumi or a Tagore. Each time the
world around me continues to happen I know that poetry would most certainly
take the shape of my mind as I read them over. Such is the beauty of their soulful
interpretations.
“Come,
my friends,
'Tis
not too late to seek a newer world.”
-
Ulysses
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
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