DULLED SENSES

As always the case when I stay in Manila a little bit too long, the results are dulled senses and inexplicable laziness. After barely a week here, I started counting the days when I can finally go back home to the mountains. Anyhow, three weeks more to beat and I’ll be gone for good.

The heavy rains caused the PAGASA to postpone classes even in the postgrad level last Thursday and so the rainy days gave me a lot of free time in my hands that was spent reading One Night With the King (Hadassah)-the fictionalized story of Queen Esther of Susa in Persia less than a hundred years B.C. I saw the movie too but I think the movie did not do half a justice to the book. The script seemed to have failed to include some very essential scenes. I also started reading the latest Harry Potter book. Somewhere along the middle of the book, I got tired and switched to watching Season 1 of the famed tv series Prison Break. Besides the fact that Wentworth Miller is cute (haha) and Dominic Purcell’s unfathomable greenish eyes make you want to hold your breath and drown in it, I think the story line is really tight and gripping. The subplots are made up of convoluted conflicts that leaves one sort of satisfied yet suspended in the air when each episode ends. So from 3pm of Tuesday until the wee hours of the morning of Thursday, I was with my laptop, stopping only to satisfy the stomach, the intestines or the kidneys. When I saw all 21 chapters of the series, it felt like it ended without closure so I texted my sister if she happened to have the sequel. She does. Being older, I asked her to bring it over to my apartment. I put the Season 2 DVD in my drive and watched until 7AM of Friday and still Prison Break 2 was far from over. Classes resumed on Friday of course and so I forced myself to get up and prepare to go to school with less than 4 hours of sleep for the last 72 hours.

So there I was in front of my class lecturing about morphophonemic-processes-conditioned-by-syllable-structure with a mind so wozzy, feet wobbly, muscles tingling from lack of sleep and body utterly dead beat that I repeatedly caught myself drifting off for a second or two while doing all I could to keep myself standing and forcing my mind to maintain alertness. It was good that the students decided to come out of their passive behavior and ask so many questions and that really did a lot to keep me awake (although some of the questions must have been a result of my failure to communicate clearly because of lethargy). Going for hours and hours without sleep is not new to me but this time, haaaaayyyyyyyyyy, I must be feeling my age.

Into the Classics: When I have time, I make it a point to read books from the 1800s. Last week I read two novels.

Pride and Prejudice. A certified classic by Jane Austen. If you have read the book or saw the movie, you would notice that the storyline is simple yet it is regarded as one of the timeless stories of the late century. Being a sucker for fairy tale-like stories, I love Pride and Prejudice immensely and specifically fell in love with the character of Lizzie (Elizabeth), an opinionated dark-haired girl who likes reading and is content in the shadows of her beautiful older sister. Even her mother does not consider Lizzie to be pretty let alone beautiful that she matched her to marry a harebrained minister. In the end, Lizzie married the richest available bachelor and had even outdone her classically beautiful sister. There are other 21^st century stories with tighter plot and arrestingly beautiful story telling but why is it that this simple story of Elizabeth Bennet became an enduring masterpiece?

The Idiot. Another classic by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky. A very interesting novel, a bit slow in many places but nonetheless a successful story. The author was quoted saying that his intent in writing the story was to portray a beautiful soul. I think he accomplished that intention.

What makes a classic? What are your favorite classics aside from Gone with the Wind? :) Any recommendations?