Tuesday 15 July 2014

A love affair with classics.

To those who have been ever so slightly smothered unkindly by academia, I ask you to take note.

Please do not ask me to fill my shelves with Chaucer or T.S Eliot or Elizabeth Gaskell, for I have not the space. Please refrain from spoon feeding me Animal Farm nor 1984 because I really do not have the stomach. I request kindly for my words to be reserved for some light hearted article and not for a 1500 word essay or two on the poetic techniques of Siegfried Sassoon. In case you were wondering no I will not be eating up Wordsworth, nor grilling some Yeats for the odour does not depart from my room for weeks.

I'd like to remind you that whilst you endeavour desperately to load your minds with majestic vocabulary and complex concepts your hearts have been left empty and they beat wildly for fulfilment.

Instead of strapping each book to a chair and torturing the words out I would suggest a much more romantic method of ingesting the sweet syrup of literature.

Forget your university professor lecturing for long hours about Doctor Faustus, or Radio 4 suggesting Larkin should be read. Alternatively become best friends with Jane Austen for she was probably a right laugh and take all of the Bronte sisters out to tea. Have an intense love affair with William Shakespeare but marry Thomas Hardy later on. Go for a stroll with Mark Twain and let F. Scott Fitzgerald take you on a wild night out. Weep all day long for every character who suffers hardship and let your heart skip a beat for every one who you become infatuated with. Pull an all nighter with Mary Shelley and have lunch with Agatha Christie. Just, for Heaven's sake, become captivated by every book you ever read and follow your heart's every literary desire because we do not have long. Books, like everything in life, can't even follow us to the grave so fill your memory up with ones that make you laugh and love and cry.

Read because you can't think of anything better in the world and never, ever because you must.