Wednesday 1 January 2020

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.”

love in lowercase | francesc miralles

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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