Turning 100...

I have been pondering for the past one week regarding this 100th post on the blog. I wanted to post up something meaningful - not one of the 5 posting possibilities that hovered in my head at various times over the week past...

Each and every one of them a rant, each and every one of them a complaint...
Each and every one of them something that I need to get out of my system.

It is then I yearned for the past - a past where I have used this blog more to ponder and to pray. It seemed that my language then was more prose-like - more refined so to speak.

Every word of certain posts seemed to have been deliberately placed next their punctuation. Every 'i' dotted with love and every 't' crossed with a purpose. It is then I realised that that 'lost world' is something I have held close to my heart all this while.

Then I remembered my interest and a certain morbid fascination I had in a horrible movie I watched at my friend's place - a movie entitled 'Chicken Rice War'. Set in contemporary Singapore with a Romeo & Juliet-esque storyline - it nevertheless set me off into a weird feeling over the past few days.

I noticed that I went back to my Shakespeare, my Ruyard Kipling and my Arthur Conan Doyle. I picked up my well thumbed tome of Richard Adams and my creased treasure of RM Ballantyne. Things I have read in ages past... and wondered what...

...have I lost?

My language today is of commerce, in marketing plans and proposals... short emails and shorter smses. My words are no longer chosen for their beauty and poignancy but for their simplicity and directness. It seemed that I have lost something I have held dear...

the simple beauty of a well written turn of phrase...
an adjective laden sentence dripping with prose...
a paragraph filled with great expectations of what is yet to come...

So I end this post - my 100th prose with a prologue that all seems familiar with - not to set any scene of the future, but a beginning nontheless. A beginning of which I hope I can bring forth more words from the past and some from the present or the future. Not all mine own words - but others that has brought enjoyment to my eyes...

Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents' strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark'd love,
And the continuance of their parents' rage,
Which, but their children's end, nought could remove,
Is now the two hours' traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

Prologue, Romeo & Juliet, William Shakesphere