She remembers fondly those days at a missionary school, about six miles from her house. Friends, teachers, homework, examinations, games, the library....and representing her school in an art competition when she was only in primary two!
At age nine she stepped into a whole new world filled with Dickens, Enid Blyton, Mark Twain, HG Wells, Jules Verne, Lewis Carrol, Hemmingway, Louisa May Alcott, H Rider Haggard ..... progressing to Austen, Bronte, Elliot, Hamka, Abdullah Hussain, Solzheniytzen ....then Steinbeck, Hawthorne, Hardy, Chaucer, Tolstoy, Poe, Ben Okri, Usman Awang, Jose Rizal, Daphne du Maurier ...... and Tchaikovsky too ...
At boarding school later, she had her fill of Greek mythology, Shakespeare, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Robert and Elizabeth Browning, Frost, Longfellow etc etc ..... even though she was in pure science. She had a great time at the school situated on top of Merbah Hill where she spent most evenings at the fence, a book in hand, looking wistfully down into the green valley below.....
As a teenager she was quiet and enjoyed studying. When others were discovering love and rushing to embrace it, she was alone and comfortable being so. Perhaps she did not have the necessary looks at that age, being thin, dark skinned, bespectacled and terribly self-concious. Perhaps she was awkward and uninteresting to the young boys from other residential schools.
Much later she was thankful for this. When most of her friends were starry eyed with the taste of first love, she was the proverbial bookworm ,the wallflower. Yet she was also sharpening her mind, nurturing latent skills, getting to know Monet, Gauguin, John Constable, Desgas, van Gogh (Vincent by Don Mclean remains her best loved song), Cezanne, Picasso and the impressionist gang, Raphael, Michaelangelo, da Vinci, Mozart, Bach, Swan Lake, the Nutcracker Suite, Fiddler on the roof etc etc... and rejoiced in hard earned success. Winning competitions in essay writing, short stories, art. Getting some pocket money when her short stories and poems were published in magazines and newspapers.
At varsity she toiled in the field she loved since her primary days. Because of her passion the years were no burden. She enjoyed the euphoria of sleepless nights before presentation, the rush of adrenalin before exams, the tons and tons of assignments......
Acquiring knowledge is so very beautiful. And very rewarding.
No comments:
Post a Comment