Dr Zhivago

Been reading Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak. Afterall I've been so overwhelmed by the miniseries staring Hans Matheson as the doctor/poet with a strong passion for life, and the women he loved. I thought I ought to check out the book and be inspired as well.

Now, I've not been reading fiction for a long time. More than a decade even. I believed it was my first church that extol us to read more self help and self improvement books on top of the bible. Since then, I've sort of cast my literary side aside preferring ideas, paradigms and boring charts from Anthony Robbins, Tony Buzan, Robert Kiyosaki and so on even Alan Greenspan to understand thinking, logic and building wealth and the stock market of course. These are considered essentials for my career maintenance and advancement however dry and boring they are.

Finally, I've the time to rest and relax now that Rachel is so independent be it completing puzzles, playing games and even reading and completing activities on her own, I can afford to read what I like not what I need to know. I reminisced the time when I was into Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Leo Tolstoy and of course Shakespeare and realised that I love literature and theatre and drama and of course opera.

So here's a glimpse of Dr Zhivago when he was kidnapped by the "forest brotherhood" for his medical skills and caught between the fighting between the Whites and the Reds in the midst of the Russian Revolution. On page 367, after witnessing a weird woman trying to apply sorcery to heal a cow whose milk was not forthcoming due to udder infection, he suddenly thought about his Lara.

"How he loved her! How beautiful she was! In exactly the way he had always thought and dreamed and wanted! Yet what was it that made her so lovely? Was it something that could be named and analyzed? No, a thousand times no! She was lovely by virtue of the matchlessly simple and swift line that the Creator had, at a single stroke, drawn all around her, and in this divine form she had been handed over, like a child tightly wrapped in a sheet after its bath, into the keeping of his soul."

And once again, when he attempted to escape from the forest camp, from the war atrocities and miseries,

"The footpath brought the doctor to the foot of the rowan tree, whose name he had just spoken. It was half in snow, half in frozen leaves and berries, and it held out two white branches toward him. He remembered Lara's strong white arms and seized the branches and pulled them to him. As if in answer, the tree shook snow all over him. He muttered without realizing what he was saying, and completely beside himself: " I'll find you, my beauty, my love, my rowan tree, my own flesh and blood."

I don't know about you but such words touched my heart and such imagery stays in my mind for a long time.