I came for the storm, but I stayed for the sun

Oh, Heathcliff!  Such exquisite torment of love!

(Whoops.  Wrong Heathcliff.  And yet the lyrics are strangely suitable.)

I finished Wuthering Heights in case you couldn't tell.  I have to admit, I fully anticipated hating the book.  In fact, I was inspired to read the book after enduring a three hour Masterpiece Theater adaptation which I so thoroughly despised, I watched to the bitter end, just to see the characters suffer.  So why on earth would I want to read the book after that?  Because I figured that there must be some reason authors I respect (Joyce Carol Oates and Alice Hoffman among them) are so devoted to this book.  And because it's kind of embarrassing that I hadn't read it yet.

So yeah, I don't hate it.  I also don't find Heathcliff to be a swoon-worthy, romantic hero, but I'm not an impressionable twelve year old either.  (Which brings up another interesting point and one of the reasons I love rereading books:  you don't just read a book, you experience what it has to offer you at the stage of life you are in.  So reading Catcher in the Rye as a forlorn and angsty teen is completely different from reading it as a reluctant, tax paying adult.  It's a bit sad to think of what impression it could have made, had I read it younger, how much more I probably would have loved it.  But I digress.)

I didn't realize how funny it would be.  For instance:

And, do you imagine that beautiful young lady, that healthy, hearty girl, 

will tie herself to a perishing little monkey like you?

-Wuthering Heights, Volume II Chapter XIII

Perishing little monkey?  That's going straight to the top of my favorite insults list.  And the word slut is used at least 3 times, probably more (I just didn't bother to keep track), which feels surprisingly modern.  

For all the sturm und drang the book is purported to have (the title has the word wuthering in it, a romantic, stormy word if there ever was one), it ends very light.  The sins of the previous generation are absolved, the future begins fresh with the promise of a kinder, gentler love, and the parties involved walk away from the darkness of the manor and into the carefully manicured lawns of a happier society.  

I have moved on to more consuming works.  Lately, I have wanted to be devoured by a book.  I have such fond memories of  night long vigils spent crouched down next to my childhood nightlight, feverishly reading.  I would usually finish the book right around dawn.  Watching the light come up on the world, I always had the same thought 'Nothing will ever be the same.'

There isn't much I miss from childhood, but that I do.