6/30/10

The International Fruit Day!

Today is the international fruit day. I say it’s a very weird choice for a celebration, no? What is the meaning of a fruit day? I mean literally, what do we celebrate? A day of antitoxic and juicy vitamin C? But the word fruit could mean so much in English, like it also could in Bahasa.

There’s a quote about fruit that stroke me deep when I first read it. The quote was of Oscar Wilde. He’s a well-known poet, and like all populars, he suffered time of trial harder than common people.

He was accused of homosexual activity. In that time, it was considered a crime. He was then convicted of gross indecency and was sentenced to hard labor for two years. He was already a successful writer and scholar at the time, having already written novels and play scripts such as The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest. So you could imagine the changes he experienced from his days of fame and his days of labor and post-labor.

In the days of hard labor, he wrote 50,000 letters to his Douglas, the guy he was accused of having a relationship with, letters that were never sent. In one of his letters, he wrote the quote I’ve been trying to tell you about.

“… I wanted to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world… And so, indeed, I went out, and so I lived. My only mistake was that I confined myself so exclusively to the trees of what seemed to me the sun-lit side of the garden, and shunned the other side for its shadow and its gloom.”

Well, I guess it’s a common thing when someone says, “I want to try everything the world can offer,” pretty much Wilde’s first sentence. But then again, we only want to try how it feels to be as rich as multinational company owners, as famous as Hollywood superstars, as powerful as US Presidents, as wild as rock stars, or as whatever as whoever that indeed was the sun-lit side of the garden. And yes, it’s human to not want to know the miserables, let me not elaborate further who they are.

But I guess Wilde’s words are deeper than that. That whatever we experienced, the good or the bad, it is the fruit of the garden of the world. Fruit here means the sweet fleshy food reserves one plant makes. Fruit here means our sweet reserves for the future. However hard it may seem, however shadowy and gloomy, we’ll taste the sweetness of our experiences later, if we want to learn something out of them.

It may not be what Wilde meant, but hey, I have every right to read it as I want it. Happy international fruit day people!

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