“What's worse than death is longing. It is unbearable.”
Or, that’s what I came to believe over the years.

The only way we can reach another human being’s thoughts, feelings is through fiction. Humans don’t express themselves, let alone willfully give away their most innermost vulnerable self. Fiction then, is the answer, where all of that gets poured in. Perhaps this is why I've always considered myself a chameleon who tries to possess fictional characters' emotional selves and I've found that among the base emotions, longing is the most powerful one. Albeit, not many hours of thoughts get into it. It is ignored everywhere.

The death of a loved one can nail devastating blows but the shock lasts only for a while. Eventually it fades away. What remains is the longing. Longing for the memories and experience we shared. The intimate exchanges. But dying is not a prerequisite. Longing is born of detachment and the hope of reunification only makes it all the more intense. This feeling of longing is ever-present, a constant thing. It accumulates and gnaws, inflicting extraordinary pathos over and over again. It does not come as a shock. It stays, stale, sultry. I think we, as a race, started to think of longing as a weakness. How wrong we are! It takes the most strong heart to endure it.
I've been musing on this for a while. The face of it, the essence of it. Maybe someday I will come up with a novel. Or a film.

Cover Source

I came across Gustav Meyrink's Der Golem (1913-14) some months ago. I’ve been reading it since then, one portion at a time. I finished the book yesterday and it seemed Meyrink understood the power of longing. I'm really glad to find a writer of my own heart. He was Kafka's contemporary and wrote supernatural fiction. Like Kafka, his tales are also of metaphorical nature.

In Jewish myth, a golem is made of clay. Similar to Shelly’s Frankenstein, it is made by a human, a rabbi in this case. Each day the rabbi takes a letter from his name to keep its power in check, subdued. One day he forgets to do that and the golem enrages, gets out of its hold and rampages the city.

In Meyrink’s book, the golem is the spirit of the ghetto, born out of their collective misery. Although, not many can see it and it is hardly ever seen. Rather we follow it’s alter ego and the story revolves around him, Athanasius Pernath, a gem cutter who suffered through amnesia. He’s also the narrator of the story.

The book is hauntingly beautiful with it’s prose and jarring narrative. It’s partly fantasy yet there is a murder mystery amongst the most interesting set of characters -- Wassertrum the junk dealer, Charousek the eternally grateful, a priest like figure called Hillel and his beautiful daughter Miriam, the village deaf and mute, the village prostitute and his lover, the prison and all of its personnel.

All good and fascinating but what grabbed my poor heart and held on pressed is when a character gets bound within chains and his love and concern for his dear one is expressed with utmost elegance, repeatedly, incessantly, increasingly as the days go by. There’s a chance that she might have been subject to a brutal rape and murder, he can’t know for sure until he’s out of the confinement. He has to bide his time. If you can’t imagine the moments of unbearable torment he has to go through, I think I’ve lost you already.

But there’s more to it than spoofed melodrama. The author himself was imprisoned for a while and his prison days influenced some of the novel. He practiced occults and such. He also entertained the idea of suicide. All of that along with a few characters were taken from his own life.

For the racing heart and distressful evenings, I have loved the novel. This is surely one of the greatest books I have ever read in my life. I’m planning to read his entire bibliography.