A voice for The Wretched Ones.

I've recently rekindled an old love affair that began when I was thirteen, the embers of which have been glowing inside my heart for a decade.  Victor Hugo, I love you.

A master of profound simplicity, here are some of my favourite passages from his book Les Miserables - a book so beautiful and so poignant it damn near breaks your heart.

‎"He pondered on the sublime conjunction of atoms that gives matter its substance; that reveals forces in discovering them, creates the separate within the whole, proportion within immensity, countless numbers within infinity; and through light gives birth to beauty. This conjunction, this ceaseless joining and disjoining, is life and death."

"A former turnkey at the prison, now aged nearly ninety, perfectly recalls the unhappy wretch who was chained at the end of the fourth row in the north corner of the prison yard.  He was seated with the rest on the ground and seemed to understand nothing about his situation except that it was hideous.  No doubt there was also a vague notion in his ignorant and untutored peasant mind that it was excessive.  While heavy hammer-blows riveted the iron collar round his neck, he wept so bitterly that he could not speak except to mumble from time to time, 'I was a tree-pruner in Faverolles.'  Still sobbing, he raised his right hand and lowered it in stages as though he were laying it upon seven heads of unequal height, a gesture designed to indicate that what he had done had been for the sake of seven children...everything of his life was blotted out, even to his name.  He was no longer Jean Valjean, but No. 24601.  As to what became of his sister and children, who knew or cared? What becomes of the leaves of a tree, sawed down at the root."

"He had asked himself whether human society had the right to impose upon its members, on the one hand its mindless improvidence and, on the other hand, its merciless providence; to grind a poor man between the millstones of need and excess - need of work and excess of punishment.  Was it not monstrous that society should treat in this fashion precisely those least favoured in the distribution of wealth, which is a matter of chance, and therefore those most needing indulgence?"

"The question seems almost justified when one considers the shadows looming ahead, the sombre confrontation of egoists and outcasts.  On the side of the egoists, prejudice - that darkness of a rich education - appetite that grows with intoxication, the bemusement of prosperity which blunts the sense, the fear of suffering which in some cases goes so far as to hate all sufferers, and unshakeable complacency, the ego so inflated that it stifles the soul; and on the side of the outcasts, greed and envy, resentment at the happiness of others, the turmoil of the human animal in search of personal fulfilment, hearts filled with fog, misery, needs and fatalism, and simple, impure ignorance."

and finally...

"Should we continue to look upwards?  Is the light we can see in the sky one of those which will presently be extinguished?  The ideal is terrifying to behold, lost as it is in the depths, small, isolated, a pin-point, brilliant but threatened on all sides by the dark forces that surround it: nevertheless, no more in danger than a star in the jaws of the clouds."