| Diary of a Neurotic | ||||||
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December 25, 2003 For so long....I have been obsessed with Michael Ondaatje’s “The English Patient” and I often quote extracts from it. The pages are loose now, bent and turned in the corners marking my favorite passages. This book I read randomly and regularly and always feel like it is updated secretly…seeing things in a different light. I only need to open it and be transported to that era of war and peace raging inside the characters. I wish I could crawl between the lines, alive with hurt, betrayal, anger and confusion. The arrangement of words…narrative, so exquisite and fascinating. I see myself in each and every character and I know I could be all of them. Hana, a shell-shocked nurse delaying the death of her burnt patient. Peeling plums with her teeth and pushing the soft fruit in her patient’s dry mouth, playing hopscotch with a nail cutter to fight loneliness at night. And after losing everyone she loves, believing she’s cursed…falling in love with a Sikh sapper. Caravaggio, skilled and artful pick pocket with missing thumbs as a reminder of the war. Walking around in shadows, stealing morphine from Hana and now picking only on human minds. I adore the English patient anonymous, aloof, silent, and passionate but all of that before the war betrayed him, before he got burnt, before he lost his only love. His detest to ownership and yet claiming her body parts, obsessed with the hollow at the base of her neck, whispering stories about the winds and Herodotus. Torn and delusional between the desert and his present burnt useless body, haunted by the memories of Katharine, their secret love, painful separation and guilt of her death in the Cave of Swimmers. I love Katharine…my favorite character…imprisoned between a man she loves and another man…her husband who loves her. Her stalking beauty, uncomfort in the desert, love for words, hatred for lies. Insisting on parting to save her husband from madness and instead evoking madness within the English patient. The way she flings objects at him breaking his head, leaving fork bites on his shoulder and walls she builds around herself to protect herself. And in the end bruised and hurt lying in a cave where they had fallen in love…waiting for him to return…to bring help…dying but hopeful of the possibility of a life together. Now there is no kiss. Just one embrace. He untugs himself from her and walks away, then turns. She is still there. He comes back with in a few yards of her, one finger raised to make a point. ‘I just want you to know…I don’t miss you yet’ They have separated already into themselves now, the walls up at her insistence. ‘You will’ she says. ‘From this point on in our lives, we will either find or lose our souls’. (The English Patient) (1:12 AM) ~`~
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