Jane Eyre - Part 1

Charlotte Bronte’s classic novel Jane Eyre relates the history of the titular character. Beginning with her tortured childhood at Gateshead with her Reed relatives, the reader is introduced to a scared, unhappy Jane. She is abused by her cousin John and rejected by her Aunt Reed; her spirits are trampled on and repressed. Finally, she breaks. She lashes out at her cousin and aunt and is then sent to Lowood School where she is educated. Here though she watches as another girl is treated mercilessly by one of the teachers. Jane becomes upset for the girl, later named as Helen Burns.

Later in the novel when Jane discusses with Mrs. Fairfax, the housekeeper, Mr. Rochester’s character, she comments that the master is peculiar and abrupt. The matron brushes it off saying, “Partly because it is his nature – and we can none of us help our nature,” (149).Mrs. Fairfax, and young Jane at Lowood, believe that if something is in a person’s nature, there is no way to change that nature. Even if the traits are bad, no one can change it into something else. It can be curbed, perhaps, but not removed or transformed.

However, in contrast, Helen holds a different perspective. While at Lowood, she encourages Jane to go against her nature and forgive and submit to those who abused her. When Jane tells Helen that she could not bear to endure mistreatment for no cause, Helen replies that it is her duty and that she ought to, as a Christian, obey Christ’s command to love those who hate you. Here, Helen says that one’s nature doesn’t matter and should not be an excuse for allowing selfish behavior. Rather, one should try to emulate Christ and form their will and nature to His.

Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet

Franco Zeffirelli’s film adaptation of Shakespeare’s classic tragedy is at once beautiful and provocative. The vibrant colors in the scenery and costuming support the life and gaiety that will eventually be crushed in the end. Romeo and Juliet’s passionate yet short-lived love arouses the watcher’s sympathies and holds their up their purity and devotion as the best as could be hoped for.

The film though portrays its protagonists as much more innocent than their stage originals. In the play, Romeo is desperate to reach Juliet. In the process, he threatens his servant Balthazar with death if he should stay to watch Romeo and then kills Paris when Paris tries to stop him from opening the Capulet family grave. The film though has Romeo speak only the kindly lines to Balthazar and removes Paris from the scene completely. Likewise, Juliet lies to Paris and her parents about loving Paris and delaying wedding over her grief over Tybalt’s death. However, the film shows Juliet merely sobbing and her parents assume that she is in deep grief over her murdered cousin and she never speaks of loving Paris at all.

Why would Zeffirelli choose to cut such actions from the characters? Perhaps it is to create a greater contrast between their love and their familial circumstances. By painting the lovers in such a way, they are pure, without fault except perhaps in loving one another. Their love is thus elevated because of this. By comparison, the constant turmoil and fighting between their families darkens the lives and feelings of all involved, each side calling out for more blood to be spilt in restitution of theirs lost. Everyone has been tainted by the feud. So when Romeo and Juliet die for their almost holy love, they are victims of circumstances beyond their control. While they tried their utmost to find a place of peace and love, their families ripped them apart.

Romeo and Juliet

The classic fatal romance of Romeo and Juliet has been repeated innumerable times throughout literature and cinema. Almost everyone knows the story of the two young lovers from warring families who would rather brave the abandonment of life and family than lose their love. As they pursue their forbidden attraction, they find their way grow steadily more difficult. Friends and family inadvertently get caught in the cross-fire. Yet their love still burns true, eventually consuming both of them. Only after their deaths do their families realize what kind of price their hatred has cost.

This tragic tale opens with a word from the Chorus, a non-participatory character.

Two households, both alike in dignity

(In fair Verona, where we lay our scene),

From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,

Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

From forth the fatal loins of these two foes

A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life;

Whose misadventured piteous overthrows

Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife. (Prologue 1-8)

In these few lines, the entire history and plot of Romeo and Juliet is given. It states the setting (Verona) with its two families warring over some grudge, much like the family feud in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. From these two families come two lovers who eventually die for their love, thus ending their familial strife. It would seem plausible that without reading any further in the play the reader would know the entire story, of course in its simplest form.

Yet one must wonder why Shakespeare would begin his play in such a strange fashion. It’s like giving away the punch line in a joke without having even given the joke yet. Normally, a story’s plot, and especially ending, is allowed to play out along their course without any foretelling. One idea is that, though the reader may know the eventual outcome of everything, he does not know the details and that is why he would keep reading. However, this seems a bit silly. Shakespeare is a lot smarter than that. As much as I think about it, I can’t really come up with a good explanation. Perhaps I just need more time to think and process but I do know that it is not an accident or whim that the Chorus gives such a speech as a prologue to the play.

As You Like It

As You Like It is one of Shakespeare’s most romantic and amusing comedies. Having such unforgettable characters like Rosalind, Jacques, and Touchstone, the story trips along, carrying the reader, or watcher, for a pleasant ride. The witty banter amidst the characters only heightens its enjoyment. Following the interactions between the lovers Rosalind and Orlando and their various friends and relations, the reader vicariously experiences all their frustrations, heart-aches, and merriment. By the end, everyone is happy and no one is left alone.

While masquerading as the young man Ganymede, Rosalind meets the love-sick Orlando, who tells her his woes of unspoken love. In response, she says, “Love is merely a madness, and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is that he lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too. Yet I profess curing it by counsel,” (407-412). She, in guise of a “saucy youth,” makes fun of the very man she loves and the malady from which they both suffer. By her own definition, they ought both to be whipped out of their lunacy.

She agrees with Plato in her categorization of love as madness yet not to the extent that it is divine. Rather, she places it on the same level as other madnesses, curable by human means and ought to be cured at that. On that point, I believe that Plato would fight with her. Plato would say that love is not “merely a madness,” something to be cured, but something to be nurtured and allowed. And, if it can be rid of, it could not be done by human means such as counsel, as Rosalind says. Granted, she is being a little ridiculous, but the ideas still remains, the idea that love is a madness to be cured by human means. Can it really? And should it?

Othello

One of literature’s greatest tragedies, the story of Othello exemplifies in tragic clarity what can happen when mistrust and revenge take root in the lives of trusting individuals. Relational lines are blurred by assumption, and provocation on the part of the villainous Iago. From the very start, Iago plans Othello’s downfall and inserts himself into everyone’s lives, poisoning their ears with lies and half-truths. No one is safe. In the end, everyone’s lives fall apart only to learn the truth too late.

At the beginning of the play, Brabantio, Desdemona’s father, accuses Othello of bewitching his daughter. Only after hearing from Desdemona herself does he reluctantly acknowledge the marriage. When Othello is called to Cyprus to fight the Ottomans and Desdemona decides to follow him, Brabantio gives his new son-in-law some advice. “Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see: / She has deceived her father, and may thee,” (1.3.293-294). Having suddenly learned that his daughter has run-off and married a man he considers beneath her, the father feels betrayed. In retribution, he gives Othello the advice to watch his new wife so that she doesn’t surprise him like Brabantio was.

However, this line seems to bear more weight, and prophecy, in the course of the story. The major tragedy of the play revolves around Othello believing that Desdemona has deceived him when she really has not. Up until this point, there has been no suggestion of falseness or disloyalty on either side, known or plotted. It isn’t even until the second act that Iago concocts the plan to bring Othello down through distrusting his wife. I think this line plants the first seed in the Moor’s mind of the possibility that Desdemona would lie to him, insinuating that if she could deceive her doting, loving father, she could certainly do it again. Though they don’t seem to affect him at the moment, I believe that these words stayed with him, thus allowing Iago’s conniving words to penetrate further and take root.

Selected Poems of John Donne

Emotion flows freely from the lines of John Donne’s poetry. From witty flirtation to near-overwhelming sorrow to awestruck love, he covers the whole gamut of human feeling. One cannot read his poems with something within them moving. One laughs at Donne’s mockery of woman’s constancy in saying that their constancy is inconstancy. In poems for those who have died, one suffers with the poet in his loss and can easily imagine the one deceased in all their virtue and grace. Finally, in some of his most beautiful poems, one learns to see God in a, possibly, new light, one cast in love and the greatest adoration. Wherever one looks in Donne’s poetry, there is no end to the ways to exercise the heart.

In his Holy Sonnet XIV (Batter my heart, three-person’d God), Donne speaks to God as one would speak to a lover, passionate and intimate.

Yet dearely ‘I love you,’ and would be loved faine,

But am betroth’d unto your enemie:

Divorce mee, ‘untie, or breake that knot againe,

Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I

Except you ‘enthrall mee, never shall be free,

Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee. (9-14)

Normally, I would not have imagined such vehement language to be directed towards God. And yet, by looking at the book of Song of Songs, this kind of speaking is not uncommon in its direction towards God. Likewise, God is the lover of our souls. Why should we not speak to Him in this fashion? Ultimately, we are to be totally in love with God alone so it seems only appropriate to speak to him in language like John Donne.

All-Night Vigil

Sergei Rachmaninoff’s All Night Vigil leads the listener through a service of prayer and worship. Singing prayers to both God and the Virgin Mary, the work uses many of the psalms as its source material, just as if at a regular church service. Other passages of Scripture are used such as the Magnificat and re-tellings of the resurrection. The choir performs beautifully, blending together beautifully and seamlessly. Yet the focus is always on God, His glory, mercy, and praiseworthiness. All these are not lost on the listener.

With no accompaniment, the vocals carry the work but do not sound as if they are lacking anything. Rather, one feels enraptured by the music. The choir brings to mind images of the angelic host before the throne of God, forever singing His praises. Interestingly, Rachmaninoff uses the altos, tenors, and basses repeatedly to carry the melody or be the primary vocal, a difference from the usual sopranos. However, by doing this, the sopranos add an almost ethereal air to the piece as they float lightly at the top of the vocal arrangement.

My favorite portion of the Vigil is V. Nunc Dimittis (Lord, now lettest Thou). A lone tenor sings the melody in a hauntingly calling way. As background, the female vocals sound like a hovering choir of angels. Towards the end, however, the whole choir enters strongly singing praise for God’s providential salvation. Then, when speaking of incoming light, the sopranos enter lightly almost like delicate sunbeams coming through the clouds. It finally ends with the basses descending slowly to the lowest note of the piece. For me, this piece utilized all the vocal parts uniquely and beautifully while, at the same time, portraying the lyrics in an audible way.

Four Centuries on Love - Part 2

Struggle, according to St. Maximos, is a given for Christians. To be close to God, one must be holy and, since humans are not naturally born so, they must toil to overcome their sinfulness. No part escapes unscathed from sin’s temptation; the intellect, the soul, the body, all are susceptible to sin. However, hope still remains. By practicing the virtues one may purge oneself of those sins that ail them, whether they be of the intellect, soul, body, or any combination thereof. Though the removal is never easy or fast, it allows the soul to ascend closer and closer to the one with whom it longs to be.

One of the dangers that man can fall into is the love of wealth, which can be produced by one of three things: self-indulgence, self-esteem, or lack of faith, the last being the worst for “the person who lacks faith loves [wealth] because, fearful of starvation, old age, disease, or exile, he can save it and hoard it. He puts his trust in wealth rather than in God, the Creator who provides for all creation, down to the least of living things,” (Third Century 18). The person who lacks faith is trusting in what he own to save him. And yet this is not possible. Though wealth can be used as a bribe to deter a person from murder, it has never in and of itself saved a person. All it can do is sit and gather dust; it has no saving power. Only God can provide salvation from trying circumstances. We must trust that He is truly good and that He does care for His creation.

Four Centuries on Love - Part 1

As a part of the Philokalia, St. Maximos writes about how a person can become whole and pure so that they can love God, and thus love people, perfectly. Vices or passions come between the person and truly loving others. Ascetic exercises such as prayer and fasting help to control the bodily passions such as greed while virtues like humility and gentleness help to curb, even eliminate, passions of the soul. By eliminating the soul’s passions and replacing them with their opposing virtues, the person comes to a closer understanding and knowledge of God which in turn leads to deeper and truer love.

St. Maximos raises an interesting point when he says “when the intellect is detached [from every worldly attachment] it will acquire love for God,” (First Century 3). Normally, love is thought to be connected to the heart, not the intellect. It would seem to make more sense that it is when the heart is detached from every worldly attachment that love for God is acquired. How then does the detached intellect let one acquire love for God? Perhaps it is because what the mind contemplates is what the heart mulls over. The thoughts that run in the head are connected to what is felt in the heart and thus if the mind is clear of all sin and vice, it would be reasonable that the heart would only feel those things which are pure.