It’s been so long since I read a decent book, any book for that matter. Ages since I last reached the last page of the book, unsure of my own feelings, confused about whether to feel glad to know how things finally went or sad at having no more to read. I remember that sense of helplessness at the end of Gone with the Wind, the feeling that you want to somehow intervene in the course of events to put some things right. I know it sounds crazy but I really love these books that by their very nature can get me so deeply involved in what they talk about. The satisfaction one has at the end of a good book is unparalleled by any other medium, music or movies. The mad rush of life in the past few years had made me lose touch with this awesome escape from reality. It’s actually unfair to call it an escape, it’s more the recognition of a newer reality, a reality that is subliminal, subconscious and yet more real than the actual thing. A book is an amalgamation of 2 people’s realities – the author and the reader which is why reading is almost an art, a test of a reader’s ability to connect and interweave someone else’s reality into his or her own and the author’s ability to relate his or her reality to the intended reader.
The Bridges of Madison County was one of THOSE books, the kind that I just talked about. At the end of the day if one gets down to dissecting it, it’s just a love story, nay a love affair to be more precise. But there were some things about the way it was written and about the people it was about that really struck a chord with me. Made me wonder about things that lead nowhere, made me ask questions that I know have no answers and yet to not wonder about those things and to not ask those questions seemed sacrilege. I love books that make me uncomfortable, that force me to look outside the shell of everyday life that I inevitably end up building around me, that make me look at newer aspects of life, that give me new perspectives and question old ones, and especially the ones that shake my idea of right and wrong, that show me shades of grey, that cover life spans of protagonists to prove that in the long run, everyone is just dead and nothing else.
The book talks about a very powerful kind of love, the kind that very few people on this planet are ever able to experience. The rest of us it seems just go through the motions. I sometimes wonder if I’ll be one of the fortunate ones, if in fact I already am. I wonder if there ever will be a moment in my life that will merit me thinking or saying: “In a universe of ambiguity, this kind of certainty comes only once, and never again, no matter how many lifetimes you live.” I wonder if THIS is the lifetime when I will be blessed with that certainty or if I ever will know that kind of certainty in another place or another life. And then who is to say, maybe I already have. It seems like it, except that the shades are different, the hues are subtler and the tinges less pronounced. Robert Kincaid, the last cowboy, one of the last cowboys, a thought that struck my heart like none other had in a long long time.
“There’s a breed of men that’s obsolete or very nearly so. The world is getting organized, way too organized for some people. Everything is in its place, a place for everything. Rules and regulations and laws and social conventions. Hierarchies of authority, spans of control, long range plans and budgets. Corporate power, a world of wrinkled suits and stick on name tags.”
It said things about the way I’ve felt sometimes, in a way which was infinitely better than any words I had ever used to describe it. I sometime do wonder if I’m one of those people who are slowly becoming obsolete, if I was meant for another time and place. After all, not all men or women are the same. Some will do okay in the world that is coming, some will not. And as the number of the soon-to-be-obsolete kind dwindles, what are the odds of experiencing the kind of certainty that every man and woman, by right, should crave for. After all, it takes one to know one, right?
But then such instances also make me wonder if such chance encounters with our true soul mates or alter egos are so special only by dint of the fact that they are “chance” encounters, never to be repeated, only to be preserved in the recesses of one’s memory and the secrets of one’s heart. Wouldn’t these encounters also become ordinary at some point of time or the other if they were pursued? Yes, there are times in some fortunate people’s lives when they happen to run into their alter egos, an opportunity to see themselves with their own eyes, to know someone who is intellectually, spiritually or physically their other half. But I wonder if the sanctity and purity of that happenstance meeting is lost due to prolonged association. Is true love a function of the serendipitous circumstances or is it a hardening bond of trust and familiarity built with someone who’s been there for a long time? I wonder…
