It's Curtains...for OHB...

"I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex."... I wud love to have the Oscar Wilde lines summing up the closing pages of OHB ("Of Human Bondage"). I wonder if these Wilde lines had any relevance to the "complex" characters with equally "complex" pleasures of "The picture of Dorian Gray"; but to a life rich with diverse experiences, shaped by relationships... some inadvertently entangled to and others willingly alienated from, driven by passion to explore distant lands...a life that chose to surpass the tortuous trail of relationships... to captivate itself in creations that the inferior intellects are unfortunate enough to comprehend...eventually embracing stability and yielding to the simple pleasures of human bonding...couldn't make the otherwise a charming novel more charming. It would be very unlikely of Maugham if it had been a short story... but for a journey of over six hundred odd pages...a life that is tossed to the extremes throughout...willing to take more...the solace that stability had brought in, is still intriguing. Would he never yearn for those cryptic lands, those revelations of solitary explorations...does the power of human bonding encompass all the practical and impractical...yearnings, fascinations and ambitions of the life lived...???