Wuthering Heights [antikvár]

WHY you SHOULD READ THIS I was sixteen, the first time I read Wuthering Heights. Miss Warren, my English teacher during my jimior year, assigned the book. I remember sitting at my desk as the copies were handed out muttering, "Great. Another dreary story by another dead EngHsh author. Dickens. Fielding. Now Emily Bronte. Why can't we read Stephen King?" We had nothing in common, Emily and I. She was a grown woman when she wrote Wuthering Heights, a Victorian recluse, living in a stone parsonage at the edge of the Yorkshire moors. I was a high school kid living in Ronald Reagan's America. What could she possibly have to say to me? At home that night, I cracked the book open. I had no choice; Miss Warren gave pop quizzes to test her students. A few pages in, I was no longer grumbling, I was gone. Hooked. Totally blown away. I knew this place Wuthering Heights. I knew the moors and the towering crags, and the aching sense of isolation they imparted. I knew the gray, melancholy skies. The deep nights. The wind sighing in the fir trees. It scared me, this knowing. It made me sit up straight. Made my heart beat faster and my hands shake. Because I had no idea how I knew. I'd never been to England, never seen Yorkshire or its moors. My life was lived in a httle town of green lawns, picket fences, and golden retrievers named Kyle. It was sunny there, not stormy and windswept. I didn't go for walks on any moors. I went to pep rallies and cheered for the home team. I went to the mall with my friends. I made goo-goo eyes at senior boys. Went to McDonald's. Ate Big Macs. Lived my McLife. In the days tiiat followed, I kept reading. I had to; I had a paper due. And as I did, I found myself becoming more involved with the story. The strange feeling of homesickness for a place that had never been my home grew. I was mystified by it. Unsettled. Unhappy. Kind of appalled. Alter all, Wuthering Heights wasn't your typical warm and fiizzy home. It was so wild and windy there, so remote and dark and untamed, so dangerous. Headcases Uved in that house. Their names were Cathy and Heathcliff, and they were totally out of control. Wild and passionate, selfish, obsessed, and insane. They loved each other, but it wasn't lovely, their love. It was fierce, overwhelming, destructive.