LIVE, LEARN, & LOVE
Do you take delight in watching
films, reading books, or listening to pop music? For English learners, movies, books, and songs are one of the most wonderful sources to explore the language! You can indulge
in your favorite pastime and still learn some expressions, words of wisdom, and
oftentimes good lessons while you’re at it.
# 3. Jean-Christophe by
Romain Rolland
"His childish passion was gone from him like a fit of fever; the icy breath of the grave had taken it all away."
-
Jean-Christophe experiences the
sudden, stark clarity that comes with confronting death. The consuming emotions
and desires that previously prevailed in his life, described as a
"childish passion" or a "fever," suddenly seem so trivial
and vanish when confronted with the ultimate reality of mortality.
"Minna,
his pride, his love, and himself....Alas! What misery! How small everything
showed by the side of this reality, the only reality - death!"
-
Everything that Jean-Christophe
valued and cherished the most throughout his life, such as Minna, personal pride, love, his own identity—is
rendered meaningless in the face of this reality. He reached the point of
realizing the sudden, painful recognition of life's apparent vanity and
emptiness.
"Was
it worthwhile to suffer so much, to desire so much, to be so much put about to
come in the end to that!"
-
Jean-Christophe asks this
rhetorical question to say how he feels about life’s ups and downs. In other
words, he means to tell you about a sense of futility and despair of what
humans go through in life when they face the moment of death.
· ** Jean’s
small thoughts:
Reading this Bildungsroman
(i.e., coming-of-age story) of a young man who develops from a prodigious but
naive youth to a mature, struggling artist, I have imagined myself living the
life of Jean-Christophe who bravely confronts love, friendship, poverty, and even
exile. Although each and every one of us has our own tears and stories in life,
not all of us come to learn from them about how to find the purpose of life
beyond superficiality.
I hope someday, I could attempt
to adopt Christophe's uncompromising nature that is based on civil disobedience
and leads him to rebel against authority and societal norms. No one in his or
her right mind should ever be unfairly stigmatized as an outcast or a misfit in
any society.
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