Unforgettable books and stories

If I had to choose a single remarkable book from all those I have ever read, I would rescue one from my childhood: The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde.

Before being able to read it on my own, I remember my mum telling us the wonderful story of this charming prince.  Having turned a blind eye to the hardship and miseries of his people during his lifetime, he is now a golden statue on a tall column in the centre of a city, from where he sees nothing but ugliness and suffering. He feels such a great sorrow and sympathy for all that poverty that the sapphires that are his eyes weep. He cannot bear what surrounds him... A fairy tale of a prince without a princess, but with a swallow which plays her role, it reminds everybody of the importance of love, inner beauty, sacrifice and charity. What a moving and instructive story for a child! What a moving and instructive story for anyone!

Wilde used to say that he had not written it "for children, but for childlike people from eighteen to eighty". Once more, he was making witty and satiric allusions to contemporary issues like the tremendous gap between the rich and the poor. He did not only aimed at ridiculing and scandalising that rigidly conventional Victorian society, but also at attacking its lack of humanitarian feelings. The dangerous game he was playing would come in with a high price...

American elections, presidents and ... poetry!

In the USA, and every leap year, the general elections have been held on the first Tuesday following the first Monday of November since 1845. Due to the fact that the country was mainly an agrarian society, November was considered the most suitable month. The autumn harvest was over and the weather conditions were still mild for farmers to travel to the polling stations. This journey could take rural residents a whole day, so Monday was a convenient day to do it once they had attended their religious services on Sunday. The first Tuesday after the first Monday was chosen in order to prevent it from falling on November 1st, All Saints Day, a holy day of obligation for Catholics. A second reason was that it was on the first day of each month when merchants did their books from the preceding one.

Whatever the results, the presidential swearing ceremony does not take place until January. And, on this day of hope and introspection, poetry has been read on some occasions. At Kennedy´s inauguration, 87-year-old Robert Frost recited one of his poems. Maya Angelou did the same when Bill Clinton took his oath of office. 

Plenty of American presidents have been captivated by poetry. Jefferson often quoted the classics, mainly Homer, Virgil and Milton. Lincoln was keen on Robert Burns. T. Roosevelt was a devoted reader of poetry and he even wrote essays about it. Jimmy Carter, who adored Dylan Thomas, published a book with his own verses. W. Wilson was fond of limericks and he composed love poems. G. Ford knew Rudyard Kipling´s If by heart and it was his inspiration.

In one of his speeches Kennedy pointed out that "When power leads men towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses"

Good reasons to read biographies

There is nothing more enlightening and inspiring than reading the life and work of great people. We live in a world built by the genius and creativity of human beings who have had the ability of achieving extraordinary triumphs and it may be instructive to know how their interesting careers have developed. In fact, their priceless lessons of experience can encourage us to start working for greatness on our own. Biographies remind us that history repeats itself. Even if the person we are reading about is unworthy of praise or admiration - we don't read about Martin Luther King or Hitler for the same reason - their real stories can be instructive and valuable.

When it comes to writers, analyzing their lives may help us understand their literary work better. Their experiences usually shape what they create. Let´s take the most intellectual and revolutionary of the British romantic poets, Percy Bysshe Shelley, for instance.

Heir of a rich estate and educated in Eton and Oxford, he gave up everything to liberate humanity from misery. An atheist and anarchist, he was considered a pariah for his lifestyle. His first wife committed suicide by drowning in the Serpentine, in Hyde Park, when he ran away with 16-year-old Mary. Shelley was only 29 when he also drowned during a sudden storm while sailing in Italy. His unrecognizable fisheaten body was found on a beach. They knew it was him because of a volume of Keats' poems in his pocket. The corpse was burnt right there in presence of Byron and Leigh Hunt and his heart was given to his second wife, who would carry it with her in a silken shroud everywhere for the rest of her life. Mary Shelley, best known for her Frankestein, would work tirelessly to edite and promote his poetry.

Apart from getting a glimpse into the minds of these two artists, these are only a few facts which will certainly make us pay attention to certain aspects of their poems and stories we might otherwise miss or consider unimportant. Now we know that his obsession with thunders, water and evil images turned out to be prophetic. Her interest in the supernatural, the weird and the horrible also had an explanation.

Cinema and Literature: The Brönte Sisters

The interplay between literature and cinema is as old as the medium of celluloid. Transferring novels, short stories, plays, and even poetry, to the screen has always played a crucial role in popularizing literature. Books usually provide films with the raw material, with a narrative line and characters which are already described. Anyway, books leave more to our imagination and films may not be completely faithful to their plots. 

Having just watched Emily Brönte´s Wuthering Heights  may make me reread this masterpiece of elemental and universal passions. Sweeping love, hate, revenge... Set against the Yorkshire moors, a landscape as wild as the relationship of the main characters, the novel is considered the heart and soul of the romantic spirit. The film is full of really powerful scenes, one of them when Heathcliff tears Catherine´s grave open, removing one side of her coffin. Gothic elements also appear in Charlotte Brönte´s Jane Eyre and the new adaptation released a few months ago. There are persecutions, a threatening atmosphere, a gloomy manor house, madness and cruelty. But this 19th century novel also heralds a new kind of heroine, one whose independence, persistence and virtuous integrity let her triumph over class barriers to win equal status with the man she loves.

Obviously, watching a film is not the same as reading a novel. They are different aesthetic genres with different conventions. Each of them has its own language and art of seduction, but both can explain the meaning of the world, who we are and what we are like. Both have the ability of entertaining, appealing to our emotions and moving us. They are simply good allies and, however good or bad an adaptation may be, it is always good news if it sends viewers back to the literary source.

Ebooks vs. Printed Books

Livraria Lello, a must-see in Porto, is considered one of the most beautiful bookshops of the world. There is no doubt everybody is impressed by its heavily decorated wooden walls and stained glass ceilings. Its beautiful spiral staircase is said to have been the inspiration for the Harry Potter moving staircases at Hogwarts School. In fact, J. K. Rowling probably visited this enchanting place quite often when living in the city. 

In today´s digital age, where e-books use is certainly on the rise, paper books are at risk of disappearing, and bookshops and libraries with them. Project Gutenberg started the first digital library in 1971, but it is nowadays when more and more readers opt for this medium. They claim plenty of advantages: when travelling the weight is lighter; if you own a lot of books, they take up much space; they are cheaper; your eyes are not so strained because you can change the size and darkness of the letters...

I think the point is not to give up reading, no matter if it is on an electronic screen or printed text. Personally, I still prefer having a small collection of my favourite books in paper neatly displayed on my bookshelf to having an entire library I will not have time to read in an electronic device. Besides, I will not get rid of my library cards yet. I strongly believe it is a wonderful experience when you browse through a bookstore in a quiet atmosphere, when you touch and hold a good book in your hands, get that comforting smell of paper and enjoy seeing a nice cover. I admit the convenience of ebooks, but I fear the sentimental value of reading may be lost.

Poetry is necessary

"We don´t read and write poetry because it is cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race, and the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering... these are noble pursuits to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love... these are what we stay alive for."     
Professor Keating, Dead Poets´ Society                                                           

I wish there were more literature teachers like Keating, someone who used poetry to inspire their students to seize the day, carpe diem, to suck out all the marrow of life, as Thoreau put it. He talked to these teenagers about Whitman, Byron, Tennyson,  Shakespeare... encouraging them to struggle to make their dreams come true.

Poems are made of the deepest secrets of the soul that need to come out. They tell about identity, discovery, survival, mortality, feelings, hopes, loss... things of primary interest to everybody in this uncertain world. 

Dickens, 200th birthday

If Dickens was immortal, he would be 200 years old today. If he was alive nowadays, he would probably have lots of friends on Facebook and he would be trending topic on Twitter quite often. He enjoyed such a fame and popularity during his lifetime that no other British writer has equalled him since then. Even Queen Victoria is said to have read his novels fervently. These were published serially in newspapers and delivered in monthly instalments, which were awaited eagerly.

The portrait he made of Victorian London is unforgettable, part of our cultural subconscious: an age of Puritan morality and strict discipline, with fathers depicted as god-like figures allowed to beat children and submissive wives; that awful fog that even made pedestrians die from walking into the Thames; the horror of prisons where whole families had to live due to debts; the chimney sweeps and the cruel conditions for orphans at boarding schools... He was the first great novelist in English to make childhood central to his fiction. Deeply wounded by the experiences of his early life, he was not only an entertainer but also an influential spokesman who attacked that new capitalist society and soulless and sordid industrialism.

Although he wrote for adults, not for children, I first encountered Dickens when I was only eight. I remember it perfectly because it was thanks to a classics illustrated comic book I got as a present for my First Holy Communion. Among other versions by authors such as Jules Verne or Stevenson, it included A Tale of Two Cities and David Copperfield. Those well-rounded and enduring characters struck me. So trapped and fascinated did I feel that, when I started to read those lively plots, I could not give them up until the end. I was just a child, but now I believe it is incredible that at that early age I already got acquainted with Paris and the French Revolution or 19th London. Sometimes I wonder what kind of literary and historical references children have nowadays. We used to follow the adventures of D´Artagnan and The Three Musketeers, The Quixote, Tom Sawyer or Willy Fog in his 80 Days Around The World. Now they follow Sponge Bob and Dragon Ball... Maybe it is also just a question of belonging to another age...