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swisspoetgoatherdChristian had always been a hoper, a dreamer, a man with 'too many frivolous thoughts and not enough useful talents,' as his father had put it time and time again. Despite everything that his father had ever told him - that love was a ridiculous obsession, that it would never bring him anything but misery and hopelessness - Christian believed in it. Above all things, he believed in love.
Which, realistically, was a shock.
A force stronger than love had taken Christian's mother shortly after childbirth. His father said it was the force of pushing Christian's thick head through her birth canal, but doctors said that she had bled too much. His father, once a man who had been as in love with love as Christian was, had fallen victim to depression once reality took his wife away. If love wasn't strong enough to save her, why was it important at all?
Christian was a hard-working student. Now and then he got into trouble for writing during arithmetic, or for dazing during history, but in general, he was academically superior to most of his peers. What kept him above the water were probably the small apologetic notes and poems he often left on the back of tests when he knew he had answered a question incorrectly. While he should have received many failing grades, he was never thrown out of school.
His father, a man of the church, had always insisted on Christian growing up to be a well-respected… well, Christian. He wanted Christian to become a priest, to live by the Bible, and become an abstinent man in his forties who was respected by the people of the community.
Shakespeare took any thoughts of abstinence out of Christian's mind.
When he was thirteen, Christian happened to stumble across a performance of Romeo and Juliet. It was nowhere extravagant, but the performance from the actors, the brutal sincerity in their voices and their actions, captivated Christian. The words had him head over heels and starving for more. He yearned for the sort of love that Romeo had for Juliet - the instant, flaming passion that the two young lovers had for each other.
It really should have said something to him when they both ended up dead in the end.
Christian's affinity for writing never ceased to get on his father's nerves. Now and then, Christian would leave poems or short stories he'd written in places he knew his father would find them. The older the both of them got, the more defiant Christian became of his father's demands that he join the church and become a priest. Christian wanted absolutely nothing to do with a stuffy organization that cared more about breeding young religious children than the heart-wrenching passion of two lovers.
Eventually, his father had had enough, not that Christian really cared. He was happy to leave on a train and go to Paris, and happier to rent himself a run-down apartment in the heart of Montmartre. As far as he was concerned, this was heaven on Earth compared to the stuffy little house he'd shared with his father for the first twenty years of his life. Young and alive, this was exactly where Christian wanted to be - surrounded by true Bohemians and on the brink of a revolution.
A revolution that was apparently so close to where he was now that it called for an unconscious Argentinian to fall straight through the ceiling.
History is continued here...
Which, realistically, was a shock.
A force stronger than love had taken Christian's mother shortly after childbirth. His father said it was the force of pushing Christian's thick head through her birth canal, but doctors said that she had bled too much. His father, once a man who had been as in love with love as Christian was, had fallen victim to depression once reality took his wife away. If love wasn't strong enough to save her, why was it important at all?
Christian was a hard-working student. Now and then he got into trouble for writing during arithmetic, or for dazing during history, but in general, he was academically superior to most of his peers. What kept him above the water were probably the small apologetic notes and poems he often left on the back of tests when he knew he had answered a question incorrectly. While he should have received many failing grades, he was never thrown out of school.
His father, a man of the church, had always insisted on Christian growing up to be a well-respected… well, Christian. He wanted Christian to become a priest, to live by the Bible, and become an abstinent man in his forties who was respected by the people of the community.
Shakespeare took any thoughts of abstinence out of Christian's mind.
When he was thirteen, Christian happened to stumble across a performance of Romeo and Juliet. It was nowhere extravagant, but the performance from the actors, the brutal sincerity in their voices and their actions, captivated Christian. The words had him head over heels and starving for more. He yearned for the sort of love that Romeo had for Juliet - the instant, flaming passion that the two young lovers had for each other.
It really should have said something to him when they both ended up dead in the end.
Christian's affinity for writing never ceased to get on his father's nerves. Now and then, Christian would leave poems or short stories he'd written in places he knew his father would find them. The older the both of them got, the more defiant Christian became of his father's demands that he join the church and become a priest. Christian wanted absolutely nothing to do with a stuffy organization that cared more about breeding young religious children than the heart-wrenching passion of two lovers.
Eventually, his father had had enough, not that Christian really cared. He was happy to leave on a train and go to Paris, and happier to rent himself a run-down apartment in the heart of Montmartre. As far as he was concerned, this was heaven on Earth compared to the stuffy little house he'd shared with his father for the first twenty years of his life. Young and alive, this was exactly where Christian wanted to be - surrounded by true Bohemians and on the brink of a revolution.
A revolution that was apparently so close to where he was now that it called for an unconscious Argentinian to fall straight through the ceiling.
History is continued here...
