09/09/09

To some people, the triple nine signifies luck. To Filipinos who are still coming to grips with the loss of a consummate Filipino, however, today is significant because it’s the 40th day after Cory Aquino’s death.

Also, Noynoy Aquino, Cory's only son, announced today that he would join the presidential race in 2010.

"I am accepting the responsibility to continue this nation's fight," Noynoy said. "I am accepting the challenge to lead this fight. I am running for the presidency in the coming election."

But let us revert to Cory's death. It’s but human nature that when one is about to die, one seeks atonement, no matter how venial or mortal his or her sins are. Cory did just that when she was in her deathbed.

By contrast, Mao Zedong, whose 33rd death anniversary the world over is also commemorating today, didn’t seek atonement at all. He didn’t take the trouble of asking for forgiveness. What he should ask forgiveness for? For the well over 70 million deaths he caused under his regime. Nor did he admit he had wronged.

Mao Zedong, born on December 26, 1893 into a well-to-do peasant family in Hunan Province, founded the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

In Mao: The Unknown Story, an 800-page tome, the authors Jung Chang and Jon Halliday made known what still consumed Mao in his last days.

“Hatred, frustration, and self-pity dominated Mao’s last days,” Chang and Halliday said.

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Two days after I struggled to finish Albert Camus’ La Chute (The Fall), I began reading John Steinback’s The Grapes of Wrath today.

When I borrow a book, I make it a point to look at the Due Date Slip of the book and see when the book was first borrowed and the last time it was loaned out. I did the same when I borrowed The Grapes of Wrath yesterday. The first time it was borrowed was on August 8, 1997 and the last time was on September 5, 2007. In between that decade, only seven people bothered to borrow, let alone read, the book.

Does this imply something about the reading taste of Holy Crossians? I leave the matter for the librarians to debate.

I’m still on the first few pages of The Grapes of Wrath, but I’ve had a fair idea what the book is about. “Particularized in the story of the Joad family,” said its back cover, “the novel is not only a powerful dramatization of the forced migration of the “Okies” from their bank-foreclosed fields and farms; it is a dramatization as well of the plight of the dispossessed everywhere.”

Writing in The Nation in 1939, the year when the book first appeared, Louis Kronenberger said of the book:

“The Grapes of Wrath is superb tract because it exposes something terrible and true with enormous vigor. It is a superb tract, moreover, by virtue of being thoroughly animated fiction, by virtue of living scenes and living characters…”

I think I can relate to this novel because our family was once driven out of our property five years ago.