Reading during the pandemic

In the midst of a raging pandemic, going in and out of lockdowns what can be more therapeutic than turning to the classics l had read reread and revered? Books I had no time for while pursuing careers and aspirations, were there to rediscover. The power of a classic is its relevance through time and the fact that it survives in the readers' heart.

On my bookshelf are Shakespeare’s plays that transport me back to my days of Lear and Macbeth, the forest of Arden and the Rialto of Venice, Dickens’s Great Expectations that traces the long journey of young Pip through strange vicissitudes, who reaches the humbling realization that life is more than wealth and status. The Bronte sisters are there with Jane Eyre an intense novel in which a young orphaned girl seeks freedom and love without sacrificing her integrity and Wuthering Heights a novel full of passion and depiction of destructive love

Tess of the D'urbervilles with her travails was my first book by Thomas Hardy, for whom I had shed copious tears in my teenage years and still leaves me teary-eyed. Pride and Prejudice an all-time everybody’s favourite, is Jane Austen’s charm offensive, a story where pride meets prejudice in the form of Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet and raises a country romance with walks through cool glades, balls and social dos to great literature. Winking at me from a corner is Virginia Woolf’s 'To the Lighthouse’ where a family seeks the happy past spent in the idyllic 'Isle of Skye'.

She addresses the ponderous question, “What is the meaning of life? The great revelation never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.” There again is the unfortunate Mr Biswas with his life long quest for a house of his own, described heart-wrenching, yet unsentimentally by the master of the polished sentence, V S Naipaul.

Shifting to Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, considered the greatest novel ever written, the epic saga of love marriage, adultery, morality, social ostracism, arrives at the principle one does not build one's happiness on the unhappiness of others.

I have followed no pattern, no road map while reading but skipping across time, read at random what caught my heart. Books get us through the best of times and the worst of times because books are family, books are community. Through them, we inhabit different worlds, look up at different skies, walk through different sunsets, enter other narratives and come back gratified knowing there are others out there as flawed and vulnerable as ourselves. They enlarge our sympathy and understanding and offer us an escape from the overwhelming moment. A validation of the human condition, an assurance that the human spirit can still prevail!