I am once again crawling back to reddit to write an eulogy to a wildly beloved classic because I just discovered it.
I recently finished reading Wuthering Heights and it has left me yearning like a lost soul.
During the day I randomly get struck with this sense of loss, of grief because I have lost something that never belonged to me.
Before now I always thought Wuthering Heights would be one of those books that would always exist in a parallel line to my life, but as the days got colder and the rain started pouring and the winds started howling, it called to me.
The reason why I thought I would never read it is because, as someone who cannot, or won't empathize with love, "romances" just never appealed to me (I say it with no contempt, it is just and idea that puts me off of them). I feel like love is treated as this great justification for anything and everything, this universal truth, you just have to throw this word in there and everything else is a given. It is treated as a complete sentence in itself, but that is hardly enough to write a book.
But, having read Wuthering Heights, I believe it is about nothing as cheap as "love". It is about great emotion, about great passion, but it isn't about love if not in its most irrelevant declination. It is about love in its meanest interpretation, in its ending and in its worn out edges.
To me the heart of the book lies in its absurd characters: they are so remote from reality that they are completely unique and by that means absolutely irreplaceable. Most are so incredibly hateful that they awaken in me a deep and unparalleled attachment. Hatred is but a facet of passion, and in the end binds as much as love does.
More than Heathcliff, I have wished for the death of Catherine with the same intensity I missed her presence when she was finally gone. Not once I pitied her and I have never felt for her if not when she expressed how Heathcliff was her outside of her. That was the only declaration of "love" I have ever understood "What were the use of my creation if I was entirely contained here?"
I was on the fence about Heathcliff. I was afraid he was going to be one of the many tragic characters saved by love and driven mad by the loss of it. But he's just a villain that knew love and wasn't changed (if not in worse) by it. He is a character that doesn't start and finish in his love story, his affection is one and the same with his resentment.
The greatest strength and the thing that most pains me about this masterpiece is its uniqueness. It cannot be replicated and because of that I will never be able feel like it has made me feel again.
I cannot understand how and why it has gotten its "mythical status as a love story", when (at least to me) it simply isn't.
by okyouknowwhatFML