The after-death woe of Hemingway (and other tragedies)

[The Benildean December 2007 issue]

A paperback has always functioned as an article of comfort for me.

At age eight, an abridged copy of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist bailed me out of the agonizing probability of being the hangdog in an afternoon of hopscotch with physically-able six graders in trainer bras.

At fourteen, to my parents’ happy consolation, I substituted booze and loco weed with Jane Eyre’s gothic-romantic melodramas.

Suicidal Sylvia Plath, paradoxically, resuscitated me from the black hole of college atrocities and slapped me back to a pink life of hope.

Not to mention that a paperback—especially that one about a wheat-haired prince with a rose-princess—has always been my favorite bedfellow.

One bookstore break, a sad panorama left me wishing for an immediate woe hero: A pile of paperbacks were thrown together in a sorry heap with a red ampersand looming over their paper-faces like a Maoist despot.

Ernest Hemingway was cheek to cheek with Geoffrey Chaucer and spawns of JD Salinger were crowding a Dim Sum How-To on the suicide-ledge of a bookshelf. Other literary paperbacks, with their creased leaves and waning colors, portrayed themselves to me as wretched casualties of a lost war—A sad portrait of the realism of literary regression.

The other books in discussion—the ones by Harriett Beecher Stowe, Virginia Woolf and even the Sweet Valley Twins included (Suck it up, literary snobs)—were on sale for a miserable
P 50.00.

With a gray, glum heart, I decided to deliver Hemingway and bagged two copies of Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises, which would have been appropriate if only my imaginary friend preferred Hemingway (apparently, he only fancies the closet at daytime and scaring the maid on a regular basis).

On a serious note, I could not stomach how bookstores could stomach retailing classics for a pathetic P 50.00 and more so, how people prefer brainless boob tube shows over a good read.

Bookstores hold thousands of classic titles which they dispose of in a year or two should the books in question flopped among the purported bookstore buffs (who, is safe to say, raid the shelves generally for gel pen purchases).

Each time I carry out my obligatory rounds at the literature sections of a bookstore, William Shakespeare would be bleeding in melancholy with his tragedies. Mute and uncomplaining at aisle H-I for Socrates knows how long, Thomas Hardy remains like his humble Jude: obscure.

Literary masterpieces like distinguished Science discoveries of then and beyond deserve high regard for the simple reason of brilliance.

And I shall ache and ache for my paperback loves.

***

Sen. Antonio Trillanes III is wretched with a delusion of grandeur.

Mr. Grandiose thought that the 11 million voters who sat him in senate shall string along when he promenaded the Makati avenue along with military men backers one dog day Thursday.

The high-flying lieutenant of cool spoke of his latest insubordination as a “moral obligation” in a half-baked mutiny plot staged at the posh Peninsula hotel where miserable guests were forced to the streets carting luggage and The Pen staff sobbing with agonizing disheartenment (redundancy, intentional).

When the grandiloquent big-talker resolved to yield to the authorities, he suddenly morphed into a bashful, clammed-up lamb.

Ha, ha!

The government, in the aftermath of the botched mutiny of the two-time mutineer, implemented a temporal curfew which miffed (and home-bounded) the booze-gulping nocturnals.

Ha!

***
The Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA) knocked down fully developed trees along Quezon Avenue to give way to a proposed road widening development.

The doomed green beings crammed the concrete avenue sidewalks, reminiscent of a sad picture of a bloodbath.

Trees are kind.

So, why?