Reading... for Pleasure

For taking the two English classes and a humanities class, I braced for myself at the beginning of the semester. I know I'll be bombarded with reading assignments, and I'll regret the day I believed in myself, that I could do this. For class, I've been reading short things, long things, plays, poems, myths and legends. One thing I got to read made me forget all that pain: Cyrano de Bergerac.

Mr. Crawford Kilian asked in his blog, Who's Your Literary Crush? a while back, and I have a name to add on my list. Cyrano. He's eloquent. He's divine. He's courageous. He's romantic. He's poetic. If this was not a fictional play... if this were reality... I would have already thrown a pair of my prettiest undergarments at him by Act 1. Could ever a man be so hot in real life?

Rostand character, Cyrano, isn't all that different from all other literary heroes or comic book heroes. After all, each one has a great weakness; Superman's got his thing with Kryptonite, and even King Arthur's got that ominous fate that works against him (i.e. Mordred). Cyrano, like all heroes, has his share of weakness: his nose. It is described as rather grotesque, and it does play a huge role in the first half of the play. In the latter half, we see that a nose is just a nose. He does get the girl, although tragically, he will not be alive to enjoy the fruits of his everlasting love.

I can honestly say that the French are the most romantic. If one can loosely say to leave morbidity to the Russians, well, leave romance to the French. They do it the best. I don't mean romance just in reference to mortal love. I mean romance to encompass all things romantic: passion, adventure, courage... Of course, ironically, the world of romance is often the polar opposite of the world of realism. Alexander Dumas' novels capture that well, and so des Edmond Rostand's Cyrano. And what about Victor Hugo! All of their characters have this quality... they just quench my heart with blood. It is almost painful when your heart extends to that character. They've got my heart on strings like Chopin's Revolutionary Etude(right click, save target as) does. Just makes me sigh. Ahh.