It is that time of the year, once again. Two days from now, the loved will battle the loveless; hormones will take on the horror of bigotry. With the right-wing’s ascendancy in India, Valentine’s Day has become synonymous with a cat-and-mouse-hunt between pupils of hatred and those with heart-shaped pupils.
But then persecution is the beating heart of V Day. Of the three Valentines who have been known to exist, one, a love-lorn figure languishing in prison, is believed to have sent a letter — the world’s first ever Valentine card, if you will — to no less than his jailer’s daughter.
For Chaucer, however, sex — not saintliness — is the heart of the matter. “For this was sent on Seynt Valentyne’s day/ Whan every foul cometh ther to choose his mate,” he wrote in “Parliament of Foules”. Pining for mates soon became a rage in letter and spirit: Henry V is believed to have got a writer to compose a V Day note for Catherine of Valois.
What has not got attention is a different kind of persecution: the suffering of readers trawling through the ‘most popular V Day quotes’. The following are some examples in a Descending Order of Suffering.
- “She had an overwhelming desire to tell him… make me your plaything, your slave…” (Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being could have been the inspiration for E.L. James’s Fifty Shades series.)
- “If my Valentine you won’t be, /I’ll hang myself on your Christmas tree.” (Ernest Hemingway married not one but four remarkable women in spite of penning such lines in 88 Poems.)
- “If I had a flower for every time I thought of you… I could walk through my garden forever” (This is not a florist’s favourite pick-up line; this is Tennyson (in?)/on love.)
- “I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where... I love you because I know no other way than this…” (Pablo Neruda’s verse does poetic justice to Kahlil Gibran’s phrase, “pain of too much tenderness”.)
Such saccharine sentiments were neutralized by the Victorian ‘Vinegar Valentine Cards’ — insulting, bitter, sassy messages sent by the broken-hearted to heartbreakers. “Your bright shining pate is seen at all shows/ And invariably down in the bald-headed rows,/ Where you make conspicuous by your tender care/ Your true ardent love for that one lonesome hair.”
These delightful missives were purged by indignant genteel souls.
Love and loss seem inseparable, eh?