Good morning, readers and book lovers, and welcome to another open forum! Puleeze, will someone among you make my day by saying you’ll do a diary for this series? Next week would be good.
Considering the topic of today’s discussion, I thought we might break our fast with passionfruit crepes and toasted hazelnuts. Those of you with libidinous imaginations will enjoy getting to work on that. And there is coffee, of course, for extra stimulation. When you’ve eaten and drunk your fill, follow me into the salon.
One day recently it occurred to me to wonder about the changes in words and the first to spring to mind was this, passion. A hundred years ago it meant something rather different from what it means today. Here’s how the dictionary on my laptop defines it:
passion |ˈpaSHən|
noun
1 strong and barely controllable emotion: a man of impetuous passion.
• a state or outburst of strong emotion: oratory in which he gradually works himself up into a passion.
• intense sexual love: their all-consuming passion for each other | she nurses a passion for Thomas.
• an intense desire or enthusiasm for something: the English have a passion for gardens.
• a thing arousing enthusiasm: modern furniture is a particular passion of Bill's.
2 (the Passion)the suffering and death of Jesus: meditations on the Passion of Christ.
• a narrative of the Passion from any of the Gospels.
• a musical setting of any of the narratives of the Passion: an aria from Bach's St. Matthew Passion.
ORIGIN Middle English: from Old French, from late Latin passio(n-) (chiefly a term in Christian theology), from Latin pati ‘suffer.’
If you’ve read a fair amount of 19th-century literature, you may remember that it often contained this sort of thing: “The child flew into a passion and stamped her tiny foot. ‘Shan’t!’ she screamed.”
In the 2st century most of us have been conditioned by the media and modern novels to think of passion as wholly sexual; yet when I think of a “passionate” character in literature I think of Jane Eyre.
A plain, poor orphan she may have been, living on sufferance in the house of her Aunt Reed, but even at age ten the unloved, un-pretty Jane was a passionate child, full of conviction about the difference between right and wrong. The scene between Jane and her cruel Aunt Reed, reproduced below, follows a meeting between her aunt and Mr. Brocklehurst, who superintends a school for impoverished female orphans:
Mrs. Reed’s hands still lay on her work inactive: her eye of ice continued to dwell freezingly on mine.
“What more have you to say?” she asked, rather in the tone in which a person might address an opponent of adult age than such as is ordinarily used to a child.
That eye of hers, that voice stirred every antipathy I had. Shaking from head to foot, thrilled with ungovernable excitement, I continued—“I am glad you are no relation of mine: I will never call you aunt again as long as I live. I will never come to see you when I am grown up; and if any one asks me how I liked you, and how you treated me, I will say the very thought of you makes me sick, and that you treated me with miserable cruelty.”
“How dare you affirm that, Jane Eyre?”
“How dare I, Mrs. Reed? How dare I? Because it is the truth. You think I have no feelings, and that I can do without one bit of love or kindness; but I cannot live so: and you have no pity. I shall remember how you thrust me back—roughly and violently thrust me back—into the red-room, and locked me up there, to my dying day; though I was in agony; though I cried out, while suffocating with distress, ‘Have mercy! Have mercy, Aunt Reed!’ And that punishment you made me suffer because your wicked boy struck me—knocked me down for nothing. I will tell anybody who asks me questions, this exact tale. People think you a good woman, but you are bad, hard-hearted. You are deceitful!”
Ere I had finished this reply, my soul began to expand, to exult, with the strangest sense of freedom, of triumph, I ever felt. It seemed as if an invisible bond had burst, and that I had struggled out into unhoped-for liberty. Not without cause was this sentiment: Mrs. Reed looked frightened; her work had slipped from her knee; she was lifting up her hands, rocking herself to and fro, and even twisting her face as if she would cry.
“Jane, you are under a mistake: what is the matter with you? Why do you tremble so violently? Would you like to drink some water?”
“No, Mrs. Reed.”
“Is there anything else you wish for, Jane? I assure you, I desire to be your friend.”
“Not you. You told Mr. Brocklehurst I had a bad character, a deceitful disposition; and I’ll let everybody at Lowood know what you are, and what you have done.”
“Jane, you don’t understand these things: children must be corrected for their faults.”
“Deceit is not my fault!” I cried out in a savage, high voice.
“But you are passionate, Jane, that you must allow: and now return to the nursery—there’s a dear—and lie down a little.”
“I am not your dear; I cannot lie down: send me to school soon, Mrs. Reed, for I hate to live here.”
“I will indeed send her to school soon,” murmured Mrs. Reed sotto voce; and gathering up her work, she abruptly quitted the apartment.
Project Gutenberg, Jane Eyre
From time to time I reread
Jane Eyre, because Jane is the most passionate character I have ever encountered in fiction. To feel so deeply is both curse and delight; those of passionate temperament experience life more intensely than others, which is, in its way, a gift.
An entirely different meaning can be ascribed to “passion,” as in Mel Gibson’s film, “The Passion of the Christ.” In this sense “passion” means “suffering.” Elizabeth Cunningham’s novel, The Passion of Mary Magdalen, recounts the tale of the eponymous heroine, originally known as Maeve Rhuad, whose tumultuous life certainly fits the title because suffer she does.
Kicked out of the College of Druids for infringing the rules, banished beyond the ninth wave for violating a tribal taboo, Maeve, half-conscious, is set adrift on the sea in a coracle. But this woman, like a cat, has nine lives. She eventually lands on the Iberian coast and winds up on the auction block of a slave market in Rome. Maeve soon finds out that her new owner, a lady who appears to be of the patrician class, is actually the madam of an extremely successful whorehouse.
Maeve soon discovers that she is gifted at her new line of work although her occupation does not prevent her from dreaming about her lost love, a dark-haired young man from Palestine known as “Esus” to the Druids. Following is a description from the Web site for the novel:
“This is a passion story: my passion, his, ours — yours.”
Equally strong-willed and charismatic, Maeve and Jesus form a union that is as stormy as it is ecstatic. Throughout the terrain of the Gospels—healings, exorcisms, miracles, feasting, riots, and terrifying prophecy—the lovers fight and make love, nurture and confront each other, infusing this unique passion narrative with passion in all its meanings.
However, as we all know, the meaning most commonly ascribed to the word
passion is that of intense sexual feeling. The collection titled
Famous Chinese Short Stories, Retold by Lin Yutang, contains the most lyrical beginning to a love story I’ve ever read.
From Passion (Or The Western Room)
Whenever Yuan Chen stopped at an inn at Pucheng on his official travels, the sound of the nearby monastery bells, especially when heard in his bed at dawn, always touched him to the quick and made him feel young and romantic again. He was in his forties, a conventionally happy husband, a popular poet, and a high official who had his many ups and downs. He should have been able to forget, or at least calmly reflect on, a love affair which happened so long ago. But he surprised himself. Twenty years had passed, and the tolling of those monastery bells in the early hours presaging the break of dawn, their familiar pitch and rhythm, still evoked in him a mood of infinite sadness, awaked some deep, hidden emotion, intimate as life itself, and a sense of the strange pathos and beauty of life which even his poetic pen could only suggest. As he lay in bed, he recalled the sight of the pale sky with its dim, shimmering stars, the suffocating emotions associated with it, the strong perfumes, and the vision of a smile that was half a smile on the face of the girl who was his first love.
In his introduction to the story, Lin Yutang (no mean storyteller himself) says: "The most celebrated love story in Chinese literature was written by the famous poet Yuan Chen. He wrote it down as a story which had happened to someone else, but it was clearly autobiographical. The dates, the events, the characters were too real and coincided too well with his own, and the writer's personal emotion was too deeply felt for it to be anything but an autobiographical account of his own romance."
So there you have several different definitions of today's word. How do YOU define "passion"? We all share a passion for politics or we wouldn't be on this site in the first place, but which other passions are part of your life, or have been part of your life in the past?