Everyday Canvas

Great Love Stories in Literature

Prompt: What do you feel is the greatest love story in literature? How did the author hook you into the story? If you aren't into love stories, pick your genre and answer.

==================

The greatest love story? I can’t narrow it down to one story, but I can talk about only a few as time permits me.

Going back in time, all the way to Greeks' Plato, the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice got to me the most, but I read Plato’s version much later, after being mesmerized by the movie Black Orpheus. The tale is about the nymph Eurydice and the musician Orpheus who fall in love and stay together. After their first night, the Greek god Aristaeus who is also in love with the nymph pursues them. Eurydice, while they are fleeing, steps into a nest of snakes and is bitten fatally. Deeply grieving her death, Orpheus plays sad songs on his lyre, making all the nymphs and gods weep. They advise Orpheus to travel to the underworld to beg for Eurydice’s return from Hades and Persephone. At the end of this difficult journey, Orpheus is allowed his wish but with one condition: He will walk in front of Eurydice and never look back until they reach the upper world. Orpheus, however, looks back to see if Eurydice is following him, only to have her vanish forever. The sadness of the story, the idea of music in it, and the human highs and foibles of Orpheus made me love this story.

The second story I love is Layla and Majnun first told by the Persian medieval poet Nizami of Ganje, but my favorite version of it is by the sixteenth century Ottoman-Azerbayjani poet Foozooli, who is known as the poet of love. In the story, Qays the poet and Layla fall in love with each other when they are young, but when they grow up, Layla’s father doesn't allow them to be together. Qays becomes so obsessed with Layla that he turns half-crazy and the people end up calling him Majnun (meaning possessed/mad). For the love of Layla, Majnun goes in the desert, concentrating on Layla’s love and reciting his poetry for her. At the end, he understands that his pain is the essence of love; the essence of love is being the love of the essence, which is God, known well as the Sufi idea of Love. Foozooli’s poetry is so superb that, I believe, no translation can do justice to it.

Where novels are concerned, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre had a great impact on me, as love lost and found, and also Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, in which lost love turned the lover Heathcliff into a sourpuss and an antihero.

I guess I am so into higher-love-touting stories in legends and such that today’s romance genre feels cheap to me for its pulling down the idea of love from the skies inside a muddy swamp, but then, who says the way love is understood by most is all that clean, lofty, and mighty? Still, love is love, and it is higher than all other emotions.