While trying to come up with a title for my second book, No Other Pearl, I came across this quote from Victor Hugo’s novel, Les Misérables: “To love or have loved, that is enough, ask nothing further. There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life.”
It’s an interesting metaphor, and one that is at the heart of No Other Pearl, a work consisting of nine stories that explore Hugo’s premise in nine different ways.
A pearl is the end result of an intrusion. A grain of sand slips in between an oyster shell and the protective layer that covers the oyster’s delicate organs. To protect itself from irritation, the oyster begins to coat the grain of sand with layers of nacre (i.e., mother-of-pearl) until the pearl is formed.
Much like the intrusive grain of sand that becomes a pearl, love enters unannounced into that most delicate of organs, the human heart. Once inside things can go one of two ways. The intruder causes harm or induces unparalleled beauty.
The heart’s response is everything. The heart’s unresponsiveness produces pain and confusion. But the heart’s surrendering embrace of that complicated intruder, like the oyster’s envelopment of the uninvited grain of sand, produces the pearl. The greater love is responsive, embracing and sacrificial, its greatest expression forged under duress, in the dark folds of life..
When imagining the greater love, many of us may think of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, or Emily Brontë’s star-crossed lovers in Wuthering Heights, Catherine and Heathcliff, their tragic ends confirming the greatness of their love. But the greater love exceeds romantic love. Hugo’s premise suggests a state of total selflessness that is superior to mutual love, love as self-giving that expects nothing in return. To love or have loved is enough, he states, not to be loved or to have been loved.
In the story Venere, Venere, for example, Norma Mars, a middle-aged housewife married to an immature philanderer finds herself at a breaking point. She meets a strange young man the day of her daughter’s wedding. This chance encounter helps her see herself and others in a new way, and to live with new purpose.
In Where Are You, Ricardo? Joseph spends a lot of time rationalizing marital infidelity as an acceptable response to the daily emotional torments of caring for his wheelchair-bound wife. Trapped in a world of fantasy, one day something happens that opens Joseph’s eyes to the stark realities of selfless love.
The Battlefield introduces Bonniah, a sensitive woman who finds herself caught in the middle of a years-long silent feud between her peculiar husband and unlucky sister. Bonniah comes to a crossroads that forces her to make a decision that will affect the lives of all three and that reveals to her a more profound understanding of the greater love.
The movement of a life from ordinary to extraordinary is worth capturing in the stories we tell one another at the dinner table, at the water cooler, in books and song. Ordinary people becoming extraordinary. The making of pearls is what I’ve aimed to capture in the stories that constitute No Other Pearl and in the odyssey of Lucas Amado, the protagonist and narrator of my novel, Mr. Galaxy’s Unfinished Dream.