Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Florentino Ariza has had 622 serious relationships (combo pack with sex) apart from numerous fleeting liaisons before he is able to embrace the only woman whom he loved with all his heart and soul. And that embrace happens “after a long and troubled love affair” that lasted 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days. Florentino is in his late 70s when he is able to behold, and hold as well, the very body of his beloved Fermina, who is just a few years younger than him. She now stands before him with her wrinkled shoulders, sagged breasts, and flabby skin that is as pale and cold as a frog’s. It is the culmination of a long, very long, wait as far as Florentino is concerned, the end of his passionate quest for his holy grail. “I’ve remained a virgin for you,” he says. All those 622 and more women whose details filled the 25 diaries that he kept writing with meticulous devotion have now vanished into thin air. They mean nothing now that he has reached where he longed to reach all his life. The...

In Andrew Marvell’s (1621-1678) poem, ‘ To his coy mistress ,’ the speaker makes an outlandish appeal to a beautiful young woman.  ‘Let’s have sex before we die because life is very short,’ is what he says bluntly.  If life were not so short, he would have spent a hundred years admiring her beautiful eyes and another “Two hundred to adore each Breast.”  He holds her at metaphorical gunpoint reminding her that though “the grave’s a fine and private place” nobody can make love there.  Sex seems to have been quite an entertainment for human beings throughout history.  No wonder, our species grew in geometrical progression and put most other species in need of our compassionate protection.  Moreover, we have come to a time when contraceptive contraptions outsell political strategies. Saint Augustine [whom I happened to quote in my last post], Immanuel Kant [philosopher] and sometimes Sigmund Freud [psychologist] thought that the sexual impu...