The premiere post for
2020 AD on this our blog, will be a dedication to all cat lovers, and with a
purpose at that!
Cat lovers are a ‘breed’
apart! I’ve known some great lovers of cats all along! Me too, being Mea mea maxima
culpa, my lord! ;-)
Sai Shri, Canadian
Victy, Prof. Rasheeda, Bhuva, are all great, ardent lovers of the feline family!
Even in Islam, as we
all know, Prophet Muhammad was a great lover of cats, Muezza being his favourite.
The Prophet loved him so much, that he would even allow the cat to sit on his
lap whenever he gave his discourses.
Quite a number of
interesting tales on Muezza - the sweet little cat - abound. One story is that,
little Muezza saved the prophet from the poisonous bite of a deadly snake. On
yet another instance, Muezza was sleeping peacefully on the Prophet’s robes
when the call to prayers was sounded. The Prophet, not willing to disturb Muezza
on his snooze mode, quite gently sliced off that part of his robe to allow
little Muezza his forty winks! Then he
gracefully stroked little Muezza three times, a gesture that would give the
agility and the ability to land and to stand on his feet whatever the
situation!
In such instance, on a
parallel vein, our first ‘book’ post for 2020 would hinge on how a little cat by
name Mishima, transformed the life of a lecturer by name Samuel, right on New
Year’s Day! Samuel, the assistant lecturer is a great language enthusiast
himself, and Mishima literally opens his eyes to the important little things of
his life. Mishima also leads him to Gabriela, a girl whom he had fallen in love
with as a boy, but since Gabriela doesn’t have feelings for him anymore, he
moves on confident, and finds meaning in the sweet little things that are
almost always in lowercase, in one’s
life!
This feel-good novel titled, love in lowercase would be a real eye-opener of sorts to we, thought me!
Every page of this
motivational, feel-good novel, leaves you gasping and thirsting for more! It
literally stirs a million chords deep within you, and makes you spontaneously head
for your guitar or your violin and start strumming to those sweet stirs of the chords
that have cast their pleasant spell on you for this longgg!
No wonder the book has
been translated into thirty languages and counting!
Coming back to the
book –
The epitaph that opens
the book bares it all in such gentle fashion for the reader –
And all the more interesting to me, as its from my all-time favvy Robert
Brault! Folks close to me woulda surely known how much I love and adore this
guy! ;-)
Says it –
Enjoy the little
things,
for one day you may
look back
and realize they were
the big things.
—ROBERT BRAULT
And this text to the
epitaph is testament to the ‘tabby power’ that’s in store for the reader on a
New Year’s day!
The first chapter
starts on a surprising title, ‘650,000 Hours’
Over to the very first
page of this francesc miralles read titled, love
in lowercase for us all -
In no time at all the
year was going to end and the new one was about to begin. Human inventions for
selling calendars. After all, we’re the ones who’ve arbitrarily decided when
the years, months, and even hours start.
We shape the world in
our own measure, and that soothes us. Under the apparent chaos, maybe there
really is order in the universe. However, it certainly won’t be our order.
I was putting a
minibottle of cava and a dozen grapes on the table—one for each stroke of
midnight, as is the custom in this country—and thinking about hours. I’d read
somewhere that the battery of a human life runs down after 650,000 hours.
At thirty-seven, I
could very well be halfway through.
The question was, how
many thousands of hours had I wasted so far? Until just before midnight on that
31st of December, my life hadn’t exactly been an adventure.
My existence
alternated between the Department of German Studies and Linguistics, where I am
an assistant lecturer, and my dreary apartment.
Outside my literature
classes, I had very little contact with other people. In my spare time, when I
wasn’t preparing for classes and correcting exams, I did the typical things a
boring bachelor does: read and reread books, listen to classical music, watch
the news, and so on. It was a routine in which the biggest thrill was the odd
trip to the supermarket.
I got up early with
the feeling that the whole city, except for me, was asleep. The silence was so
intense that, although I was still in my pajamas, I had the guilty feeling that
I was committing a crime by making myself a slice of buttered toast when most
human beings were still sleeping off their hangovers.
I didn’t suspect that
the new year had a surprise in store for me—a small surprise, but one with
world-shattering consequences.
I turned on the gas,
made some coffee, and swallowed the last mouthful of toast.
I sat on the couch
thinking I’d dive back into a book by an American writer whom I’d found quite
entertaining the last few days. I’d bought it on Amazon after seeing it mentioned
in a novel.
As I was pondering
that last entry, I realized that I’d been hearing a persistent noise for
several minutes. It was a slow, steady crunching sound, as if some insect was
gnawing its way through the door.
Shrugging it off, I
went back to the couch and picked up the book, but before I could focus on the
page the noise started again, much louder. It can’t be an insect—not a
normal-sized one, at least. I listened harder and, yes, it seemed that the
rasping was coming from the door. I went over to it warily, wondering what kind
of lunatic would scratch at someone’s door.
Spurred on by fear, I
flung the door open, hoping to startle my enemy.
But no one was there.
To be more precise,
there was no human being visible at eye level. Bewildered and staring at the
empty landing, I felt something soft and warm coiling around my legs.
I instinctively jumped
backward and then looked down to see what had been attacking my door. It was a
cat, which greeted me with melodious meowing—a young cat, but bigger than a
kitten: a tabby, like millions of other cats that run around and climb things
in this world.
The cat tried to
placate me by rubbing against my legs more energetically…
Nope dear ladies and
gentlemen! I’m not letting you know furthermore over here, on Mishima on this
little post!
You better grab
yourself a copy on Amazon rightaway!
Well, the underlying theme
to the novel is this:
Love need not be
always on uppercase mode! As in, about loving people and suchlike! Love also has a lowercase to it, where even a beautiful little cat can change your life into
something better! Now Samuel is able to have friendships with all kinds of folks - his neighbours,
his vet, and people he meets at the bar! He feels that he doesn’t know more
about Gabriela, as much he knows about the people around him! Moreover he also
has an intuitive feel that, love is better off spent in lower case on the
little little beautiful things of life, with Mishima at the helm of it all!
Why does he feel then,
love has gotta be lowercase!? That’s because of his sour relationship with
Gabriela that had opened his eyes to the beautiful worlds within the lowercase
words!
More on the
Gabriela-Samuel encounter for y’all -
Somehow it dawned on me
that Gabriela, my childhood love, had come back to me because I’d filled a
saucer with milk. There was no apparent link between the two things, but they
were connected at a deeper level. After I had poured milk into his saucer, the
cat had hidden away in my apartment. Then he had led me to the old man, the old
man to the modeltrain shop—and to Gabriela.
Now I knew that our
future depends on such tiny acts as feeding a cat or buying a section of
model-train track.
I checked the time.
Half past three. In just over an hour I’d see Gabriela again. The mere thought
of it made my hands break out into a cold sweat and my pulse race.
She sat in the chair
facing mine.
Gabriela looked at me
as if she had some kind of weirdo sitting across from her. Then she took a deep
breath and, with an expression that had abruptly turned serious, asked, “What
do you want from me? I don’t even know who you are.”
I was stunned into
silence. I’d planned to tell her lots of things before confessing what I felt
for her—that is, if I was capable of doing so. Now I was facing her final
verdict without having been given a chance to submit a single piece of
evidence.
Gabriela looked at me
with concern, as if she suddenly felt responsible for my pain, but I had just
experienced her contempt and wasn’t willing to face her pity as well. I stood
up and, leaving her still sitting at the table, said, “I’m sorry for bothering
you.”
The wound was so deep
I had to go somewhere to lick it in order not to bleed to death.
With a newly hardened
heart I rushed up to Titus’s apartment to immerse myself in the chapter that
was entirely appropriate to my situation: “Treasures of Solitude.”
I decided that,
however much it hurt, I’d banish any hopes I had about Gabriela and embark on a
new path, no matter where it would take me.
I’d put an abrupt end
to our chat before he could ask about Gabriela and promise to call him again.
Titus, however, was a
sly old fox and guessed the truth.
“Samuel, I can tell
that things aren’t going so well for you.”
“What are you talking
about?” I protested.
“The most important
thing is to keep loving life. As Freud said, we must begin to love so as not to
fall ill.”
The phone rang. It was
Gabriela again, completing her previous message.
“What I was trying to
say was that I’d like to see you again if you’re not angry with me. Perhaps we
can be friends. I promise to behave. My phone number is—”
Even before she had
finished speaking, Meritxell stood up and got her bag and coat, saying, “It’s
getting late.”
In order to accept the
love of others, you need a wise heart because rejection’s easier to cope with
than love. You can turn against someone who is attacking you, but what are you
supposed to do when someone reveals their love for you?
Before I went to sleep
I thought that it was very nice of [the vet lady] Meritxell to want to have an
afternoon snack with me and put up with my blathering.
Despite her abrupt
departure, there had been something between us that enabled us to reveal
ourselves as we were, without being afraid of saying or doing something wrong.
But, what about
Gabriela? Why had she called me just then?
It was as if, from a
distance, she’d noticed that I was starting to get involved with someone else,
and she wanted to put a stop to it so that my yearnings would again be focused
on her. But why?
But why?
For this you should
try! ;-)
Yes! Try grabbing for yourselves a copy of love in lowercase, righaway!
Samuel, in one of his
rendezvous of sorts with this old man, a wisened old editor gets amazing
lessons for life for the new year!
Just snippets from the
discussion for us all -
“Are you coming in or
not?” a voice called from the living room.
“Sorry, are you speaking
to me?”
“Who else?” There was
a burst of laughter.
I went into the living
room to sort out the matter of the cat and leave.
The old man was
sitting at a modern desk in the middle of the room.
Without sparing a
glance at me, he continued to type away at his laptop. At his side lay a
popular-science book, A Short History of
Nearly Everything. That was where I’d read about the 650,000 hours.
“Right now, the
biggest void I can see is in your Head,” said the old man.
The man was beginning
to fascinate me.
He continued. “Atoms
are like letters. The same ones that make up the Songs of Kabir or the
Canticles from the Bible are also used for articles in gossip magazines and ads
for hair lotions. Do you see what I’m getting at?”
“So when we talk about
building blocks, letters, or atoms, what matters is who arranges them and what
use is made of them. In other words, what we are isn’t important. What we do
with what we are is important. Hours are worthless unless you know what to do
with them.”
On this last
noteworthy point, I sign off, ladies and gentlemen, wishing y’all a Happy 2020
ahead!
- Rufus
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