“There are some touching illusions which are, perhaps, sublime realities.”—Victor Hugo, Les Miserables
Book sits on reading table or wall’s top shelf. Bookmark creeps slowly into its volume between long pauses and time away until I return to it again; but it is always there, waiting for when soul should seek again.
I returned to it last week. I couldn’t say why. God has means for communing messages of spirit; and fate is strange, sometimes foreshadowing in symbols—stronger and more overt—than any author onto page.
It’s one of the greatest books I’ve ever read, and—without its recommendation by a friend—one I never would have touched: remaining known title with recognizable cover image, frail little girl, but forever a stranger to its Wonder in spun tale.
This is my second reading. The first, I began into it through life shift when soul-stirrings inspired and aligned with the glorious, dream, fate, and destinies foretold: soul-affections, inspirations, trembling touches from discernment of God’s guiding hand and force in destinies and lives. I read it in morning darkness, beginning day with love and hope in heart that rose and found answer in affirmation-light of breaking dawn.
It—and Dante—are the nearest to magic, dare I say GOD, that I ever encountered in reading of a book and alignment of message and parallel life experience.
The book changed my life. It changed my heart. Its first read is an experience I will never live again, but to have lived it once—that it moment of spirit and transcendence lived at all—will forever be enough. It was a blessing then and remains so now, even after immanent emotion of then is lost.
To my friend, Jean Valjean is the greatest literary character ever dreamed, the nearest embodiment of a Christ-figure in a living common-man, even if only a fiction, ever created. The romantic and Dreamer in me was drawn to Marius and Cossette—the little lark, saved and raised by the Holy layman.
Saturday, I received news from another friend. Our friend who led and gifted me experience of this great story was near his end.
His children had said goodbye.
“The peculiar feature of the violences of destiny is, that however polished or cool we may be, they wring human nature from our very bowels, and force it to reappear on the surface.”
This was the last highlight I made, night before, in the great novel his recommendation gifted me. Receiving news, it lived as so.
*****
“Carve as we will the mysterious block of which our life is made, the black vein of destiny reappears…”
December 10th, Army Navy played. There is no bigger game either of us knew. I don’t know if it was your plan, God’s plan, or something mutually agreed; but this is day and way you went.
Two overtimes, you kept fighting, but it was not an end any hoped to see.
Soon after alma maters sang, I learned you were gone.
I like to believe, in some way, your spirit was there competing a final time—one of those impossibilities God makes possible through hope and surrendering of one’s self and sense to the absurdities of God’s Will.
That’s Kierkegaard. You introduced me to him too.
I hope you played, fought, and sang the alma maters after; moving in body that answered to your commands and God-given instincts, living one more time a game we both loved to play before moving on to whatever follows after.
I look forward to the day when we speak again; reflecting on and complimenting the acuteness in Dante and Swedenborg’s visions—or laugh on their still-beautiful absurdities, as well as our own.
Most of all, I hope you are in peace, know that you are loved, and that your life—even brief—fulfilled its, and God’s, purpose.
“There are some touching illusions which are, perhaps, sublime realities.”
This is the second-to-last quote I marked night before you passed. God has means for communing messages of spirit, and fate is strange.
We always seemed to mark the same places, and of the last two, this passage hit me most. For this, it’s the one with which I choose to end.
I believe its words are true and you already know it so.