活着 To Live, a novel by Yu Hua, 1993 (Discursive Aside page 18)
Charles Dickens in his A Tale of Two Cities:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
There may have been much politics, history, and moral philosophy in A Tale of Two Cities, but I read it as a girl, just clutching at English-as-a-new-language, and what I got from it was a story about a girl, who had two (identically handsome) men in love with her. When the one she chose was in danger of his life (something-something about the French Revolution), the other stepped up, took her young husband´s place under the guillotine, sacrificing himself for her happiness.
The self-sacrificing suitor Sydney Carton (pre-guillotine):
It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.
I read William Makepeace Thackeray´s Vanity Fair around the same time, in pretty much the same way. There may have been a lot about the “vanity fair” that is English society, but I mostly got from it Amelia Sedley choosing between George Osborne and William Dobbin.
Leo Tolstoy´s War and Peace? Same-same. Yes there may have been some commentary on the Napoleonic Wars (the War part of the book title), but I think it was mainly about Natasha Rostova´s love-life. War and Peace opens when Natasha was thirteen. This was ideal, because the summer I read it, the summer before 7th grade, I was twelve, so it was relevant to me, and I read it the way I read Seventeen magazine: borrowed from the public library, of things so far beyond my ken as to be all equally fantasy, whether 19th century Moscovite aristocracy or Homecoming dresses and latest make-up for fall. For me, the moon was not further away than Vancouver Island, when neither was reachable. A Saint Petersburg soirée was just as imaginary as the junior prom.
Just as The Iliad and The Odyssey are Ally McBeal and Desperate Housewives, War and Peace, Vanity Fair, A Tale of Two Cities were Twilight, Fear Street, and The Baby-Sitters Club. All the stories were the same, variations on a theme.
Here are Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart´s variations on a theme:
Here are Johann Sebastian Bach´s variations on his theme:
Two weeks ago a colleague died. I think he was 39 or something around there. I had not known him long or well. I had not known who he really was, what made him tick, what his hopes, dreams, pains, or sufferings were. I wish I had made an effort to be friends. I wish I had stopped him, to talk, to get coffee, to ask about his day. I´ve been talking to him in my head the last week, since I knew he was gone. Saying all the things I could have said, wish I had said, when he was still alive, asking him about himself, about what he thought, telling him about me, about my own thoughts, dreams, hopes, fondest wishes, great fears, all the things I would have told a friend if I had known…
When I ride the bus, I think about how he would never again ride the bus in Berlin. When I see the sunlight streaked across the upholstery, I think about how he would never again see the dustmotes dance on the air. When I smell the rain and the cloudy overhead weather of Brandenburg I think how he would never again feel the wind that I´m feeing now or go on to another day as I do.
In my head, we have all these conversations we didn´t have, I never thought to have, when he was still alive.
Maybe each of us, is living just one variation on the theme. Each variation sounds so different, but the theme is the same: to live.