Angels and Demons

Dan Brown, one of the most accomplished storytellers of the 21st century, is also the author of some of the most poorly constructed opening sentences in publishing history. To wit:

Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum's Grand Gallery.

Physicist Leonardo Vetra smelled burning flesh, and he knew it was his own.

Death, in this forsaken place, could come in countless forms. Geologist Charles Brophy had endured the savage splendor of this terrain for years, and yet nothing could prepare him for a fate as barbarous and unnatural as the one about to befall him.

As linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum noted before in his highly informative and snarkily entertaining post , "The simple fact is that if you are ever mentioned on page 1 of a Dan Brown novel you will be mentioned with an anarthrous occupational nominal premodifier ('Renowned linguist Geoff Pullum staggered across the savage splendor of the forsaken Santa Cruz campus, struggling to remove the knife plunged unnaturally into his back by a barbarous millionaire novelist'), and you will have died a painful and horrible death by page 2, along with several curiously ill-chosen clichés and mangled idioms."

In literature, one can judge the worthiness of novels by the artistry and economy of their opening sentences. Who can forget, for example, the profound simplicity with which Gabriel Garcia Marquez begins Love in the Time of Cholera? "It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love."

But what is true of literature is not quite true when one considers public perception: truly, he who laughs last, laughs last. And it is with the full, bitter regret of scented almonds that I lament the painful and horrible beating that the Filipino people has taken due to the brutal inhumanity of the perpetrators of the massacre in Maguindanao.

The sublime artistry with which Manny Pacquiao dispatched Miguel Cotto? Forgotten.

The overwhelming generosity of spirit with which Efren Penaflorida shares the best of himself and by extension, the Filipino people, with the urban poor? It's almost as if Penaflorida's courageous selflessness never happened.

Instead, we are left with the grim reminder that man is a killer angel, whose sometime, lamentable descent into barbarism stems from a fatal misunderstanding of Hamlet's observation:

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how
infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and
admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like
a god!

It is only when we act as if we are gods that we cease to be human.

We lament what happened in Maguindanao. But let us remember what also happens whenever we recall that our lot in life is not simply to be the authors of tragedies. Mother Theresa once said, "Do not think that love, in order to be genuine, has to be extraordinary. What we need is to love without getting tired." This guy does not tire. Neither should we. Hope floats. And with hope, truth.




Photo Credits:

Picture comes courtesy of Gulf News