The Classics and I

I have always been a little slow at understanding the works of writing that are best described as Classics. The kind of literature that is profound and serious and employs a lot of big words and long sentences.

I discovered exactly how slow, when I was in classes 11 and 12.

I had shifted to a different (and more difficult) syllabus after class 10. At that point of time, I had thought nothing could be tougher than the exams I had already written (Oh my innocent mind!!) and opted for a syllabus where I would have to study The Tempest, The Discovery of India, Great Expectations, a collection of short stories and a collection of poems.. (in addition to the mountain of books prescribed for science) whew!! We were told that we were allowed to study all or any 4 of these (Shakespere being mandatory). I was determined to do all the books.

Oftentimes, ordinary mortals like me do not realise what they are getting themselves into. We realise such matters only later, by which time it is extremely late.

I shall refrain from describing my attempts at understanding the sciences and shall continue to describe my adventures with the literature course.

The very first class of Literature served as what is commonly known as an eye opener, and left my eyes as wide open as they possibly could be! Our teacher began by reading a few lines from the play (ACT I Scene II)that went thus:

Enter PROSPERO and MIRANDA
MIRANDA:
If by your art, my dearest father, you have
Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them.
The sky, it seems, would pour down stinking pitch,
But that the sea, mounting to the welkin's cheek,
Dashes the fire out. O, I have suffered
With those that I saw suffer: a brave vessel,
Who had, no doubt, some noble creature in her,
Dash'd all to pieces. O, the cry did knock
Against my very heart. Poor souls, they perish'd.
Had I been any god of power, I would
Have sunk the sea within the earth or ere
It should the good ship so have swallow'd and
The fraughting souls within her.

Having understood about 0.3% of the entire reading, I looked expectantly at my teacher's face for further translation. The only words that fell out of her mouth were "Oh, the charm of Shakespeare!".

Erm.. that wasn't what I was hoping for. Undeniably, Shakespeare's writing has a large amount of charm, but at that point of time, I was hoping for words that would translate that charm into simpler words.

We were asked to go through the first scene of the act and summarise it in our own words. I wanted to burst out laughing. It was then, that I noticed that none of my classmates had followed the reading. Well, at least I had company.

The summaries that the class turned in the next day were atrocious, disgusting, ridiculous and about 5 other adjectives that my memory simply refuses to remember now. To the absolute relief of me, my classmates, our teacher and probably the great bard himself, my teacher consented to explain the entire play. Once she began to do that, I genuinely started to appreciate the writing. We were required to quote the text in our examination and we started to memorise the more important lines. We even started using it in class. I got into trouble when my mathematics teacher thought I was using terribly foul language when I called another classmate a "debauched fish"! It took us a while and the textbook to convince her that I was not using foul language in school.

Just when I was beginning to think that I will be able to scrape through the examination after all... we began work on "The Discovery of India" by Pt. Nehru.

I was introduced to some of the longest, most profound and at some places the most contradictory sentences ever written. Sometimes the sentences were so long that one lost track of what was being expressed in the beginning. I remember one afternoon that seemed extremely hot, my teacher's voice started to turn more soporific than usual. Let me tell you that reading and understanding something Pt. Nehru wrote is extremely difficult, at least for me. And things like sleepy afternoons and soporific voices do not help at all. That seemed to be the case with most of my classmates who were absently staring at the teacher.

We were in this state of semi-consciousness, when she suddenly stopped reading. For those of us who fear the stage, there is a fear that numbs one's limbs when one walks up on stage and looks at the audience. This fear numbs the mind as well, in cases like mine. I experienced something not very unlike this particular fear. All the others did too, for they all looked as alert as soldiers at war.

We then discovered that after reading a particularly long and jumbled sentence (which we were frantically trying to spot now), she had realised that the contradiction was too much and had slowed down to make understanding the idea easier for us. A remarkably polite gesture - only that none of us knew which sentence she was talking about.

I thought this was the toughest it could be. I thought this with extreme confidence for I had not yet seen - I repeat..seen - the book of poems. After one class of poetry, I decided to be sensible and opted not to study that extremely-well-written-but-impossible-for-my-head-to-understand collection.

The collection of short stories and Great Expectations were much much better. I finally saw a ray of hope with respect to passing the examination, which I miraculously did.

As the examination approached, I was extremely nervous. I had learnt the text so many times that my sister complained one morning of having heard Shakespeare for 20 minutes in the middle of the night. One friend told me to look at it this way.. 'they'll just come and go, and after that we shall be free'.

Erm.. remarkable approach..but what was I supposed to do after they came and before they went?

Well, like she said, they came and went and I managed not to faint with nervousness in the meantime. I must admit they were not all that bad...

I won the gold medal for highest marks scored in the Literature paper. Heh! Heh! :D