Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

This book is a tsunami of passions. Passions that are as wild as the moors that surround Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. The characters have an emotional depth, a quite stunning liveliness, that breathes life into the dialogue. Written in coarse and creamy Victorian style, this is a story of deceit, corruption, jealousy, vendetta, and Love. A love so fiercely passionate, so annihilating that it consumed all happiness from the lives of the people who had the misfortune of dwelling in its proximity.

 

To say that unrequited love, is the purest and truest form of romantic love will not be too wrong. Love, as we know it, when reciprocated becomes a mutual affair, a sentiment to be shared between two people, an emotional variable whose value can never remain constant for long. It becomes a public matter, other people get involved and it gets rather complicated. A million other things start affecting it. But such is not the case with one sided, Unrequited love. Because its yours to borne and nurture. You have exclusive rights over it, you can keep it hidden from the whole world, a secret that will remain private for as long as you want, and will be your companion through out your life. It is not a pleasant thing. And it is, I believe, a thing that only few can do.  But Its only possible when the association with your beloved is more than mere infatuation or sexual attraction, but a bond that transcends categorisation. A bond that becomes an integral part of your identity and to break it, is to shatter your own self into a million pieces.

Heathcliff didn’t just love Catherine, he belonged to her. And she to him. They were more than childhood playmates, they were companions. And any journey without your companion is an ordeal, a torture worse than waterboarding. Where every step, every corner and sign board impresses upon you the fact that you are alone. Habit becomes necessity, and life as you know it, begins and ends with ‘her’. To live without her isn’t just impossible, but implausible.

Heathcliff’s love for Catherine comes from a mutual feeling that its them against the world. That they are aliens from a different land who’ll only find solace in each other. Robbed of that, there is little left, but to torment and destroy everything that comes in their way. Everything that even remotely reminds them why they are not together.

Heathcliff, spent almost all of his life in mourning and remorse. While you pity the poor Hindley, Hareton, Catherine, Edgar, Isabella, and Nelly, spare some pitying for Heathcliff too. He is the man who lived without the woman he loved. Nothing is more painful then that.

The story is so full of hatred and anger, and vindictive fury that the reader is compelled to find parallels between the lives of its protagonists and the writer. Emily Bronte lived a simple life, with marked paucity of adventure and thrill, and she died young. In her brief youth, she must have yearned for something invigorating,  Something to make life bit more thrilling, and less stale. Maybe this was how she spilled it all out on paper.

Love, as dear old Sherlock puts it, is a dangerous disadvantage, and Sentiment, a chemical defect found on the losing side. To love is to put your self out there, to expose your vulnerabilities, to lower your guard. Love isn’t just a matter of temporary infatuation. It is that craving for thrill that makes you jump off the cliff, it is the vain hope that stops you from abandoning a sinking ship. It is a million abstractions, a thousand confusions and a hundred emotions, coiled into one long spiral of Double Helix that constitutes the very basis of who we are; Humans. We love, even when its not worth the effort, even when its pointless, hopeless and stupid. We love because this is what makes us “US”.