show me your illusion, let me keep mine

I’ve been crazily in love with Lord Worth, the most delectable fictional male I have ever read about, ever since I first discovered his existence nearly five years ago. Unfortunately, he is a creation of Georgette Heyer, a writer who just about falls short of intellectual respectabilty, especially in today’s reading landscape where a novel just has to boast self-involved characters, a rambling, pointlessly eventful plot and a seemingly pressing need to ‘expose’ the depressing nature of our world in order to be celebrated and seen as conferring intellectual distinction on whosoever chooses to read it.

Phew, long sentence. But quite apart from digressing into my usual argument pitting popular vs. literary and the relative merits of either category, this isn’t an angry defence of my right to read Heyer without feeling the guilt I ‘ought’ to feel, but rather, an attempt at defending my right to construct, embellish and maintain illusions as a conscious choice I should be allowed to make.

Lord Worth in Heyer’s own words:

“He had a look of self-consequence; his eyes, ironically surveying her from under world-weary lids, were the hardest she had ever seen, and betrayed no emotion but boredom. His nose was too straight for her taste. His mouth was well-formed, firm but thin-lipped. She thought he sneered. Worse than all was his languor. He was uninterested, both in having dexterously averted an accident and the gig’s plight. His driving had been magnificent; there must be unexpected strength in those elegantly gloved hands holding the reins in such seeming carelessness, but in the name of God why must he put on such an air of dandified affectation?”

The story this evidently fantastic creation (for which modern man could ever live up to so much?) inhabits is one that displays his intelligence, his determination and his foresight in a manner that is artfully calculated to make him attractive (both to his fictional heroine as well as the starry-eyed female reader). Unfortunately, as most women discover once they’ve been in a disappointingly mundane romantic relationship or two, Lord Worth is a scarce commodity, especially in a 21st century that is concerned with destroying those two all-pervasive illusions that mankind has held onto for hundreds of years: Love and God.

God, as most intelligent, articulate beings of a certain economically-forward and educated class will assert, is a fictional creation, designed to provide some sense of purpose and order in an essentially
chaotic existence. Our social systems, our senses of self, our lives are lived on the assumption that there is some sort of meaning to the successive events our lives inevitably revolve around: birth, primary education, secondary education, employment, marriage, reproduction, old age and death. Without God, without concepts of duty and morality, the social structures that we have created around the above events collapse, as it has now. Let it be noted that I’m not judging this collapse negatively, I’d rather proffer no opinion on this point!

Anyway, now that God’s out of the way, the next major illusion is Love. For centuries, we’ve been telling ourselves, helped along by culture’s minions Art and Literature, that the ultimate source of meaning (on earth) is Love. And what is love, in 21st century psychobabble, but an illusion we’ve constructed to act as not just a source of comfort, but also a convenient excuse for lust?

In our enlightened times, however, we feel no need for such illusions. God is inferior to money, love is inferior to lust – or rather the former is too distant an objective when faced with the possibility of immediate gratification, as afforded by the latter, in each case. In such a world, Germaine Greer’s dissection of Heyer’s heroes (Lord Worth in particular) as being part of the “romance myth” and the “rituatlization of sex, which is the essential character of romance” might be accepted as enlightened, intelligent and praiseworthy.

My argument is not about the relative merits or demerits of either situation; I’m not saying religion and romance are illusions that are to be hegemonically enforced. What I do object to, however, is the general perception of their antithesis, their overturning and dissection as being the work of a superior understanding.

Perhaps I’m alone in thinking so, but I certainly think it a braver thing to knowingly hold on to an illusion merely in the hope that it offers more meaning to one’s life, than to throw all of one’s beliefs away simply because that act would bring one the most approbation from the world at large. I suppose, in a nutshell, what I’m attempting to say is – let me keep my Lord Worth and scorn him if you like, but don’t you dare judge my intelligence on the basis of the illusions I choose to perpetuate for myself.

what am i to do?

3.13 am, and I’m still feeling warm and fuzzy from watching Emma – the 1996 version with Gwyneth Paltrow and Jeremy Northam.

Vaguely troubled with regard to certain unpleasant behaviour (both on my own part as well as other people’s) but I know that by tomorrow, I shan’t be bothered. God bless my fickle emotions!

I’ve now graduated from Austen – mainly due to a lack of more novels by her on my bookshelf at present, something that shall soon be remedied – to Tolstoy. I needed to keep the mood, which I would surely have lost had I started reading either non-fiction or the Ian McEwan novel that’s been calling out to me for weeks.

Three days of staying home and being lost in pursuit of literary improvement have left me wanting to go out tomorrow and see what the rest of the world has been upto. I think I will.

Good night :)

invasion.

I’m so unbelievably angry right now. Maybe it’s not that much of a big deal, but how dare you, how dare you think of making decisions for me? Just because some part of me is under your control doesn’t mean you regulate what I see and what I don’t..

And please, don’t even think of trying to interfere in my relationships with people. Just because I fucking made the choice [which right now seems to be coming back to spite me] doesn’t mean I sacrifice everything I hold dear. And sacrifice for this pathetic excuse of an experience seems to be a very tall order indeed, so don’t even expect it.

I’m so sick of it. Tired, fatigued and just worn out from constantly wondering whether what I’m doing is worth it or not. It’s a bit ironic, really, this role-reversal. I’ve always been the one sitting back and taking it easy and now, I’m turning into the super-bitch who can’t help but throw her two-penny advice into everything. I don’t know how long I can take doing something I’m not meant to though, so let’s see how far this goes.

I still wonder what it might have been like. In a different place, a different outcome. That doesn’t really bode very well, I know, but I’m only human and being so, I’m plagued with thoughts of what-might-have-been. Accidents can happen and this one seems to have been for the worse.

I’m trapped in this invasion of space and thought and idea and I can’t think of a thing to do. It’s eating, eating, eating constantly taking away all the light and happiness of this place I once thought of as free.

P.S: Take with a pinch of salt – this is an annoyed rant.

push it!

I was recently thinking about how drastically my priorities in life have shifted. I used to be a complete geek – I knew random facts about literature and history; I walked around quoting my favourite writers and I was never out of place in a literary discussion. Two and three quarter years into my Bachelor of English Literature course and I’ve found myself fumbling. I don’t remember the last time I was so engrossed in a book I couldn’t even bring myself to get a glass of water even if I was dying of thirst. I didn’t top a single paper last semester. I don’t say anything in class, unless the ridiculousness of the argument gets to be entirely too much for me to bear, and I simply have to make myself heard.

The crowning insult, if I can call it that, is that I’m surrounded by people who don’t have the same sort of commitments that I’ve made, and whose entire lives can therefore be devoted to literary study – which is exactly what I would have imagined myself doing, if not for Fate and her tricks. And hence, I find myself making presentations, booking flight tickets, managing people and dispensing advice galore – leaving me very little time to indulge in observations or debate on literary topics.

Oh, I have no one to blame for this but myself. I won’t deny though, that it does rankle a bit. I’ve always prided myself on being the best – and it was admittedly a head-splitting blow to find myself relinquishing that position to other people. That little immature creature inside my head does resent this, though who I’m resenting exactly, I’m not very sure about. It ought to be myself, and the circumstances in which I’ve put myself, rather than anything else.

I’m making a promise to myself though: I can’t deal with being only second-best. I’d probably die if it endured for a prolonged period. Therefore, I’m taking action to remedy this pathetic and UNBEARABLE state of affairs.

Heck, I’ve even forgotten the line of succession of the English Monarchy – believe it or not, I had it down pat. Now I find myself scrambling to remember which age is whose. Ugh.

To tell the truth, I’m a little disgusted at myself for having sunk so low. I can’t bear to be beaten – my ego cringes at the very thought of relinquishing the title to anyone else and therefore, I suppose I’m going to have to pull myself together, run back to the grindstone, and throw myself into whole-heartedly being in love with nothing else but the written word.

[At the end of this semester, I just want to be able to say the following sentence in my head - 'take that, bitch. I'm back']

P.S: In retrospect, this seems a bit… inflamed. Sigh, such are the ways of the drama queens of the world.

like a stone [please, not!]

I’m constantly amused by people who claim to be indifferent and shout their cynical views from the rooftops. It’s these people who claim to have a rational view of the world, who claim that they are not affected by those around them. They affect their own sense of detached irony, of having some sort of aversion to extremity, never realizing that by making their opinions on so-called “drama” heard, they are involving themselves far too much – they’re being drawn into the very environment that they claim to be apart from.

Life’s full of such conundrums – you can’t renounce one thing without automatically justifying it and so on. What irritates me is that some people believe, that by virtue of believing themselves to be balanced individuals, they form unfair and slightly biased opinions of those around them who choose not to be quite so cold. Which is something that makes me laugh because hey! if you really are that balanced, calm and rational – you wouldn’t care two hoots for the way I [or anyone else for that matter] look at life.

I’m a strong believer in the idea that life is only as dramatic or mundane as you make it. If you’re the kind who likes to be loud in your grief, violent in your passion, cold in your anger and thoughtful in your solitude [not to mention verbose in your expression!] then you will probably end up caring more than is necessary, find yourself living life as though you’re an actor in a play and every minute is filled with ten thousand different feelings, each as intense as the other. I’m one of those that chooses this sort of existence – I choose extremes. In fact, I’m pretty sure I can’t lead anything but a life that’s extreme – and made so only by my perception of it.

So, if you in your entirely rational and practical existence, are at a loss to understand, it only means you don’t have the capacity to. Or, more likely, you’ve denied yourself the capacity to experience and more importantly, to revel in extreme emotion. In my eyes at least, the path of minimalism is the easiest. You’re either too afraid to dig deeper, for fear of what might stare you in the face, or you’ve tried it once and it wasn’t exactly as you imagined it would be, and you don’t want to go back and try again.

I don’t care too much for cynicism – I’ll admit, I’ve had my phases of devil-may-care and I’ve found myself always, always coming back to my baser instincts for pure, extreme emotion. Robert Frost might have shunned them, but for what it’s worth, I court the Fire and the Ice and I love them both.

As for verbosity – I’ve spent about eighteen years of my life building my identity on my relationship with language. I like words, and I’m not afraid to use them. Heck, if I have it, I might as well flaunt it.

Cheers.