Vendôme

Y ou live a little, form some small ambitions, construct ideals for the ego, and accept the world.  When quietude creeps in at midnight, you fright for the empty streets.  The hollow, cartoonish happiness that oozes from every walking person is drowning you.  When society pours its constructs into you, you hide away from these imploding influences.  Yet at the crack of dawn, you rise sluggishly to face the world again. >  You dream of days of youth not because you were careless and free, but because you were never truly integrated into society. To you, the world does not matter; to the world, you do not exist. From timid nods to firm handshakes, you progress as the wind blows. After all, you are a crop to be harvested from years of indoctrination.  Others may oblige willingly, but you don't. You dream of tearing down the machine, hoping that in the end, it will be  you  that finds the Achilles' heels of this monster— but you never do.  Hai...

It has been two hours since dawn, and another hour since Finn woke from a dream. He recalls a faded scene from it: he has broken a large vase, and water cascaded and escaped. He soon woke and brushed the dream away. He is going to bathe, as the water often washes his lingering thoughts away. The tightened lace men's shirt is being tugged by Finn. However, the strings become undone only slowly. He takes off his shoes, stashes away his toolbox by a birch tree. The air is crisp today, and the morning mist has only started to descend in the town. He suddenly had an urge to climb atop of the mounds, where he would view not only the town, no, but the lake beneath him. The morning quietude aches for Finn's arrival; it aches for someone to intrude. His bare feet carry him skyward.  The skies are dimly overcast— he feels tipsy and dreary already. He sits upon a cliff— a small cliff— not enough to cause fright. Below him is an open lake that mirrored the world above. Runlets drip from th...

  When I started reading in English, I picked up the Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. The characters are nested in a world of cartoonish reality. Like most books with symbolic characters, it haunts me deeply because the characters have no pluralistic light — they are so orchestrated that besides their intrinsic representation, they are saturated of other identifying personalities. Again, I didn't understand then that literature can appear in whichever form it demanded to be. Here is my second read of the aviator's prized work, The Little Prince .  I wrestled with the idea of love between the Rose and the Little Prince.  "It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important."  The Little Prince discovers the sprouting rose, waters her, and tends to her with the most tender hands. She blossoms under his care, yet her stubbornness, pride, entitlement, and vanity repel him. The love he provides to the rose is not reciprocated, and he...