A tale that touches sensibilities
Tulip Chowdhury loves a story of love
A more beautiful story of a boy growing up into a man could not have come up.The story of David Harper, a boy born with passion for love and learning, captivates the mind. This saga is capable of holding the reader spellbound and has one smiling and crying for the gripping plot-developments and the real life characters. The story, taking place in Buck County, Pennsylvania, also comes up with beautiful scenic descriptions with intriguing details. Once into the book, the reader seems to be with a wonderful friend who is whispering about divine wisdom and the secrets of life. David was born in an orphanage and never knew his parents. As a little boy he found himself in a poorhouse in Doylestown in Pennsylvania. His friends were Old Daniel, Toothless Tom and Luther, also living in the poorhouse. They were men who have experienced life through different seasons. These men held out their hands to the boy as if to help him cross the pitfalls of life. David grabbed them with his little hands. And as times sailed by David started to grow from a little boy to a man. Old Daniel is one of the many friends to offer David insight into life. The boy listens to the old man giving his sermon as he says, " Thinking is something different altogether! Think always as if the hot hand of hell were grabbing for you. Think to the limit of your mind. Imagine, dream, hope, want things, drive yourself to goodness. Whatever you do, David, do it to the absolute best of your ability. Never take the easy way where thinking is concerned." Thus Old Daniel starts the boy toward reaching for the peaks with his thoughts. And the old man advises him to read to his full brim. The hunger for knowledge is born in the boy and he starts to spend hours in the library immersed in books. He attends school and his teachers become his mentors. There is Aunt Reba, his only surviving relative wanting him to quit school and work in the pant factory. He defies her orders, something he has never done before, and continues his school. He learns that the way to success is education. His mathematics teacher Miss Choler arouses in him the wonder of the subject and he is able to solve difficult equations mentally. In time he joins college in Deadham with full scholarship. Beside his interest in mathematics he finds history and art fascinating. He is soon reading away the life and works of Chaucer, Renoir, Cezanne and Rembrandt. The heart that often cries with his lingering poverty finds richness in knowledge and he looks at his life in the poorhouse as part of his varied experience of life. He is never ashamed of his poverty for he is filled with the greatest richness in this world; the richness of knowledge. Again in college he finds dedicated teachers who hold out torches showing him the way to a life filled of honour and glory. It is his music teacher Klementi who teaches him that the strong men of the world stood on the grounds of honour and not the weaklings. It was Klementi again who arranges a scholarship for David to go through college. David is a passionate young man and his first love Nora is a fiery prostitute. She is older and knows her world. When Nora dies in a tragic accident David tosses and turned in his poorhouse bed and he cannot even guess that men are able to live because slowly, one by one, they snuff out the fires of spring until only embers burn in white dignity, in loneliness and often in cold despair. Klementi, befriending David, tells him that he will overcome the grief for "….hearts are like springs, they snap back." When David graduates from college, Marcia, a really nice girl from a good family, falls in love with David. Marcia's father makes arrangements for David to get a decent job as a college teacher. And yet David's heart is seeking adventure. He is surprised when his own heart fails to respond to Marcia and seeks instead pleasure in a wild chase of happiness with a drama troupe. As he moves across the south his heart once again finds love, in Mona, a singer in the troupe. David's life is not bound by familiar settings. The changes in his life leave him wondering about the secrets of life. He leaves one life to join another. And as he does so, he feels the death of one life clinging to the coattails of another. At times he feels as if life is a kaleidoscope. With the changes David learns to love America. He finds that America holds not only beautiful dreams but there are also the tales of loneliness, poverty and its discontentedness. David's story of a man growing from rags to riches is a spellbinding tale. The character of the protagonist as drawn by the author is captivating. The human interest aspect is poignant! One cannot but feel empathy for the poorhouse boy. The inquisitive mind of the growing boy does not fail to draw admiration from the reader. When David falls in love the helpless emotion of the young man has the reader feel like leading him to his desired happiness. And then all along right from his life in the poor-house and all through his various stages of life we see David as a very generous and brave young man. First published in 1949, The Fires of Spring is an epochal novel that marks the eternity cycle. It is amazing how this book remains so vibrant 50 plus years after its release. The book Tales of South Pacific by James A. Michener won the Pulitzer Prize In 1948. The Fires of Spring is a discovery of a lifetime. There comes immense joy and contentedness settles in the heart after reading this extra ordinary novel.
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