Last weekend I holed up reading Fourteen Love Stories, edited by Jose Dalisay, Jr. and Angelo R. Lacuesta. I unexpectedly found this book in Fully Booked for only 170 pesos! It was a very good bargain. It's also a very refreshing read. Seldom do you find this kind of compilation -- of books written by Filipinos, with references to our home country, and about something so abundant in our lands -- love.
The stories are arranged chronologically, from the earliest published to the most recent. It kicked off with a story that I've loved since high school -- Dead Stars by Paz Marquez Benitez. I was surprised to learn that it was first published in 1925. Steadily going through the book, I somehow felt that the style of writing was lost through time. A style so structured yet so beautiful. A style that set the tone correctly and used words not to impress, but to fit the tale perfectly.
So I leave you with 2 excerpts from the story, hoping we can still bring this style of writing back.
The first one written so beautifully and sharing my sadness with the setting sun:
The golden streamer was withdrawing, shortening, until it looked no more than a pool far away at the rim of the world. Stillness, a vibrant quiet that affects the senses as does solemn harmony; a peace that is not contentment but a cessation of tumult when all violence of feeling tones down to the wistful serenity of regret. She turned and looked into his face, in her dark eyes a ghost of sunset sadness.
And the last few lines of the story, the ones explaining the title:
So that was all over.
Why had he obstinately clung to that dream?
So all these years--since when?--he had been seeing the light of dead stars, long extinguished, yet seemingly still in their appointed places in the heavens.
An immense sadness as of loss invaded his spirit, a vast homesickness for some immutable refuge of the heart far away where faded gardens bloom again, and where live on in unchanging freshness, the dear, dead loves of vanished youth.
