Semester III: Two nights before exam
"Remember the great principle of your century: always be the contrary of what people expect." It took almost four nights to finish Stendhal's Red and Black as I now take a little walk around the hostel campus. My mind's in a complete state of unrest, and calculating my own future as I contemplate upon the circumstances of nineteenth-century France. Sorel, the pretentious protagonist whom I really detested in the beginning, for all the reasons that made him a hero of the novel, had me change my mind about him now that I'm eventually done reading the text. It is a world of pretension and hypocrisy, not very unlike ours. I can't really blame Sorel for being a complete hypocrite to climb up the social ladder as those already on top are the ones who have the fortune of both money and power and have even less real personae. It is a society where you have to keep up a face, dress accordingly as it's your clothes that define your social position. It's whe...