Romantic Passages From Literature

I love literature. I am a hopeless romantic. And it is Valentine’s Day. So what better time than today to share some of the most romantic excerpts I have come across in books? Last year I wrote a post on classic love poems. https://wordpress.com/post/literarygitane.wordpress.com/912 This year I’m sticking to prose passages. Not all of them are cheesy, I assure you. In fact, most of them are sentimental and sweet. 

Love At First Sight

The French have a special word for it. They call it un coup de foudre or a bolt of lightning. I am reminded of that first fateful meeting at the train station between Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Count Vronsky. He is captivated by her beauty and needless to say it’s only a matter of time ( umm ..like a few seconds) before he falls head over heels in love (or lust) with her.

“In that brief glance Vronsky had time to notice the restrained animation that played over her face and fluttered between her shining eyes and the barely noticeable smile that curved her red lips. It was as if a surplus of something so overflowed her being that it expressed itself beyond her will, now in the brightness of her glance, now in her smile.” Anna Karenina, Tolstoy 

Love is blind and love blinds. Especially if your gaze is upon a dazzling beauty. Our Count continues to be blinded by Anna’s looks. “He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.” All he wants is for her to belong to him. Never mind that she is married to someone else. And that she has a son. Those are minor impediments in the face of this grand love. I mean what can be more enticing than forbidden love? Even though this love will be the ruin of them and lead to destruction and alas, even death.

The First Kiss

What’s love without some heart- racing lip action? There are kisses and then there are kisses. Here’s a kiss that leaves you breathless and weak in the knees:

“His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.” The Great Gatsby, Scott Fitzgerald

Sigh! I think my own heart beat faster and faster and my breathing stopped when I read this passage. And my incarnation is complete. Okay, let me not forget this one little detail. Daisy is a married woman. What’s with these men in novels who seduce married women?  Duh, it’s the thrill of the chase. After all, an inaccessible being is more mysterious and alluring. Just imagine if the fascinating creature were within grasp! Wouldn’t our lovesick hero start taking her for granted and move on to the next conquest? Shh… but today is not the day to be cynical.    

Declaration of Love

I am a sucker for novels like Rebecca and Jane Eyre with the theme of the good, innocent and kind-hearted young woman who has to learn to be brave in a cruel, hostile world. Throw in an evil stepmother- like character, a brooding and distant hero well-versed in the ways of the world and an enchanting socialite who is not an ingénue like our poor heroine and I’m in a romantic literary paradise! Never mind if the brooding man has skeletons in his closet or gasp! ….a wife already stashed away in there. Jane Eyre is one of my favorite novels and Mr. Rochester, one of the most romantic literary heroes. So I forgive him his flaws and even his sordid past in exchange for these delicious lines:

“After a youth and manhood passed half in unutterable misery and half in dreary solitude, I have for the first time found what I can truly love — I have found you. You are my sympathy — my better self — my good angel. I am bound to you with a strong attachment. I think you good, gifted, lovely: a fervent, a solemn passion is conceived in my heart; it leans to you, draws you to my centre and spring of life, wraps my existence about you, and, kindling in pure, powerful flame, fuses you and me in one.” Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë

Who needs sappy Hallmark cards when you have such a heartfelt outpouring of emotion to express your love?

Marriage Proposal

Charles Dickens is one romantic soul. In fact, the guy is all mush. Of course his novels are Dickensian in the true sense of the word but some of the most romantic lines show up amidst the descriptions of squalid working conditions, abject poverty, and the plight of orphans- one could expand the adjective ‘Dickensian’ to include unabashed sentimentality and romance. When I first read Great Expectations, I was struck by Pip’s one-sided love for the cold-hearted Estella. “I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.” Unrequited love is a thème de prédilection with Dickens. There is this passage in Our Mutual Friend where Bradley Headstone asks for Lizzie’s hand in marriage. Would any girl decline this impassioned proposal?

“You know what I am going to say. I love you. What other men may mean when they use that expression, I cannot tell; what I mean is, that I am under the influence of some tremendous attraction which I have resisted in vain, and which overmasters me. You could draw me to fire, you could draw me to water, you could draw me to the gallows, you could draw me to any death, you could draw me to anything I have most avoided, you could draw me to any exposure and disgrace. This and the confusion of my thoughts, so that I am fit for nothing, is what I mean by your being the ruin of me. But if you would return a favourable answer to my offer of myself in marriage, you could draw me to any good – every good – with equal force.” Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens

Oh no, these words ring hollow to Lizzie and she turns him down. Oh, our poor rejected suitor!

Till Death Do Us Part

But here are two people who had better luck and are looking forward to a happily ever after:

“It was Dinah who spoke first.

‘Adam,’ she said, ‘it is the Divine Will. My soul is so knit with yours that it is but a divided life I live without you. And this moment, now you are with me, and I feel that our hearts are filled with the same love, I have a fullness of strength to bear and do our heavenly Father’s will, that I had lost before.’

Adam paused and looked into her sincere loving eyes.

‘Then we’ll never part anymore, Dinah, till death parts us.’

And they kissed each other with a deep joy.

What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life — to strengthen each other in all labour, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?” Adam Bede, George Eliot

With all due respect to ‘Corinthians’, don’t you think this passage is far more suitable for a wedding reading?

Love Letter

Sometimes you mess up in life and in love. Lucky are the people who get second chances.  Jane Austen’s Persuasion can seem like a rather dull novel in comparison to the delightful Emma and Pride and Prejudice but to me it portrays a more realistic picture of love. Anne Eliott broke off her engagement with a young man she was in love with on the urging of Lady Russell as he was a man beneath her social class. She made a mistake many years ago and is paying dearly for it. She still pines for Frederick Wentworth and at the ripe old age of 27 her prospects seem bleak to her. The two cross paths again years later ( meanwhile he has become a Captain in the Navy and he is considerably richer..cough, cough..noteworthy developments we can’t ignore.) and they are still in love with each other but won’t admit it. Oh my God.. but can he forgive her for breaking his heart all those years ago? You know it will end well. It’s a Jane Austen novel after all. And he writes one of the most romantic letters ever. Swoon!

“I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you.” Jane Austen, Persuasion

Okay, I admit it. Everytime I read this, I get a little teary in the good way…out flow tears of relief and joy. Who wouldn’t like receiving such a romantic love letter and that too from a dashing captain? If only people still sent love letters to each other in this age of texting? 

 

People complain that such sublime sentiments only exist in books and movies. But it is possible to experience such love in real life if you accept that love is not perfect and never will be. None of the love expressed in the books was perfect or smooth -sailing. These love relationships were far from uncomplicated. Anna Karenina and Count Vronsky’s love was doomed. And so was Gatsby’s. Jane Eyre had to contend with a skeleton in Mr. Rochester’s closet ( literally! ) and a husband who lost his eyesight. Bradley Headstone was unlucky in love. Adam Bede pursued Dinah’s cousin, the extremely pretty Hetty and hoped to marry her before he proposed to Dinah. Anne Eliott and Captain Wentworth had to wait a long time to find each other. Perhaps we need to recognize that there is a difference between love and the illusion of love and that true love is perfectly imperfect. I’ll end with a passage from Corelli’s Mandolin where Dr. Iannis explains what love is to his daughter Pelagia. This passage which is a realistic depiction of love is actually recommended by registry offices for a wedding reading:

True Love

“Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being “in love” which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.”  Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernières

 

Do you have any favorite romantic passages you like to read again and again? Please share them in your comments. Hope you enjoyed reading my favorite romantic lines. Now go woo your sweetie with these words. They will speak volumes of your love. Happy Valentine’s Day! 

 

 

 

 

The Hideaway of a Young Girl : A Literary and Historical Pilgrimage

Six year old Anne at Montessori School in a happier time.

The Diary of a Young Girl is one of my most cherished childhood books. I was around the same age as Anne Frank when I first read the book and like many other adolescents, I could relate to the young girl and her angst. I was vaguely aware of the chilling horrors of the holocaust but at that age I mainly found a kindred spirit in Anne for she was a normal teenager like all of us encountering the same problems –squabbles with her sister, feeling misunderstood by grown-ups, dealing with the awkwardness of puberty, the onset of the first period and crushes on boys. Anne poured her heart out in her diary, her friend and her confidante whom she lovingly addressed as ‘Kitty’, during the two years she spent in hiding in ‘The Secret Annex’ with her family when the Nazis occupied Amsterdam. Little did I imagine that one day I would be entering this personal space so vividly described by the spunky and precocious teen! I re-read her diary before going on a trip to Amsterdam and had quite a different perspective on it as an adult. The book, along with the moving and sobering experience of visiting the house, brought home with full force the atrocities inflicted by the Nazis.

The Anne Frank Huis located at No. 263 in Prinsengracht in Amsterdam is where Anne Frank lived in hiding with her family for twenty-five months during World War 2 along with the van Pels family and the dentist, Dr. Fritz Pfeffer. They hid in the Achterhuis or back house (Secret Annex) located at the back of the Opekta and Pectacon office and warehouse where her father, Otto Frank, ran businesses making spices and seasonings for meat and pectin for jelly. Otto decided to find refuge here when the Nazis began rounding up all the Jews to send them to Westerbok, a transit camp near the Dutch town of Assen before deporting them to Auschwitz- Birkenau and Sobibor in German occupied Poland where they were ruthlessly exterminated.

Otto’s employees and friends played an important role in keeping the businesses running and the family safe. I am going to name them all as they risked their lives to protect the family- Johannes Kleiman, Miep Gies and her husband Jan Gies, Victor Kugler, Bep Voskuijl and her father Johan Voskuijl. They did grocery shopping and brought food for their survival and books and magazines to entertain them and were their only contact with the outside world. Bep signed up for correspondence courses in shorthand and Latin in her own name to continue the children’s education. These well-wishers whom Anne referred to as ‘helpers’  represented hope in their small acts of kindness and show us how human nature is as capable of compassion as it is of cruelty.

The self-guided audio tour began in the warehouse which has a door to the left which immediately leads to a staircase up to the first floor where the offices were located. The interactive displays and audio clips shed a lot of light on the era and prepared us for what was to follow. We then entered the storeroom to access the secret annex which is connected to the main house by passageways. The doorway to the annex was concealed behind a moveable bookcase expressly constructed for this purpose by Bep’s father, Johan Voskuijl. It was a surreal feeling to step behind the original bookcase and enter Anne’s world. The living space was only 540 square feet in area. On the first floor we walked through the room shared by Anne’s parents, Otto and Edith and her sister, Margo, and then entered a small room shared by Anne and Fritz, the dentist who got on her nerves. On the wall we could see posters of celebrities just like the room of a typical teenager.

On the second floor is the area where the van Pels lived. It is the largest room of the annex and also served as the communal living room and kitchen as it had a stove and sink. Next to it is their son Peter’s room which is just landing space coming down from the attic. The house is bare other than a few photos and mementos but that adds to the poignancy and as a reminder of how the Nazis ruthlessly stripped them of their lives along with their belongings. Yet there are a few things here and there that make you well up with tears like the original strip of wallpaper where Otto marked the girls’ height as they grew.

Canal side entrance to the museum

Anne’s diary reveals how during the day they had to be very quiet and tiptoe around the place, tense and fearful,  lest they be discovered by the workers of the warehouse. They washed and got ready before the workers came in and then they got busy with their reading and school work. They prepared their own meals and canned food for future use. They were most relaxed at night after the workers left. They would listen to the BBC and Radio Oranje and discuss the war and politics. They celebrated birthdays, Hannukah and Christmas and tried to keep their spirits up. But they also had arguments living in such close proximity to each other and as the war progressed the tiffs got worse when they started running out of supplies. Often sleep was elusive as air raid sirens and bombings could be heard throughout the night. In spite of all the difficulties and dangers they faced, Anne’s diary was laced with her youthful idealism and optimism:

“In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.”

“The two of us looked out at the blue sky, the bare chestnut tree glistening with dew, the seagulls and other birds glinting with silver as they swooped through the air, and we were so moved and entranced that we couldn’t speak.” Photo courtesy of annefrank.org

 

The entrance to the attic was barred. I was eager to climb up the stairs and take a peek in the area which served as a meeting place for Anne and Peter and their budding romance and which also had a narrow window from which they could furtively look outside into the world. Anne loved looking at a giant chestnut tree in the courtyard, a little slice of nature to soothe her confined soul. I was disappointed that I couldn’t go there but immediately realized how painful it must have been for the inhabitants who couldn’t go anywhere and as prisoners had nothing but the little hurried glance from the window to content themselves with. They were deprived of fresh air, of sunlight, of nature, robbed of all the little freedoms we take for granted every day.

After the tour of the annex, I descended to the museum area which houses photographs, documents and objects that belonged to the family including Anne’s original diary. It was heartbreaking to see the pictures of the family in happier times. There are touching video clips with interviews with people who knew the family including Miep Gies who was particularly close to Anne and Anne’s friend who met her on a few occasions at the camp and managed to survive the war. Anne made her last entry in her diary on August 1, 1944. Their hiding place was revealed on 4^th August, 1944 when they were betrayed by someone who tipped the Gestapo and they were taken to the Westerbok transit camp on a passenger train and eventually to Auschwitz on a freight train.

Only Otto Frank survived the war. It broke my heart to imagine the pain of the man who lost his entire family all at once. Anne’s mother died of tuberculosis at Auschwitz and the girls contracted typhus at Bergen- Belsen where they were transported to from Auschwitz. And isn’t it a cruel joke of fate that they were on the verge of freedom, that their camp was liberated just two weeks after their death? It was Miep Gies who gathered Anne’s papers and notebook after the hiding place was ransacked and gave them to Otto who sent it for publication. Somehow the Gestapo had left these papers alone. Anne had expressed a wish to become a famous writer in her diary. Ironically, her wish came true but not in the way she wished for it to happen. Who knows what she would have achieved if she hadn’t been plucked before her prime? A young life was robbed of its potential. Millions of lives were robbed of their potential.

I stepped out of the building with a heavy heart and a lump in my throat. Outside it was business as usual in the city with the hustle and bustle of tourists and their bikes and boats calmly floating down the same canal from Anne’s time and the same chiming of the bells of the Westerkerk that Anne heard regularly throughout the day. But a small nondescript corner in this bustling city will forever bear witness to the tribulations and trauma of not just one family but a race at large and to the resilience and indomitable spirit of a young girl who showed so much dignity in her suffering. And as for the old chestnut tree, unlike Anne it died a natural death. It finally succumbed to disease but not before scores of cuttings were taken from it and planted all over the world to grow new trees. And similarly Anne’s legacy lives on through her story which continues to inspire countless people everyday around the world.

PRACTICAL INFORMATION: I recommend booking tickets online in advance before visiting the museum. The lines outside can be very long if you decide to purchase tickets on the spot. I had tried to buy my tickets online a few weeks before my trip but they were already sold out. I tried again a few days before my visit and luckily I was able to obtain them as they had some cancellations. Keep trying even after they are sold out. There are always people cancelling the last minute. Photographs are forbidden in the museum not only to preserve the original artifacts but also as a respect to the sanctity of the place.