I read Les Miserables by Victor Hugo (translated to English by Julie Rose) because Sergio moved to Belgium. He was in his mid-fifties and he had never been to Europe and he was anxious about the move. I had a business trip to Amsterdam in June so I asked him if he’d like to join me in Paris after I was through with business in Holland. He agreed. So on the second day after his permanent move to Belgium I met him at a boutique hotel in the 11th arrondissement with a colleague of mine, Lashonda Sasser. I decided to prepare for the trip by reading a book that is set in Paris so that I could acquaint myself with the city and I selected one of the most famous books ever written about Paris. It was a good choice because it was insightful and delightful. It took me 4 or 5 months to read it and I was only half way through it when I got to Paris.

Hugo on Love

In this state of mind nothing escaped him, nothing fooled him and he saw to the bottom of life, of humanity, of destiny, at every instant. Happy, even in his anguish, is he to whom God has given a soul worthy of love and of calamity! Whoever has not seen the things of this world and the heart of men in this double light has seen nothing of the truth and knows nothing.

The soul that loves and that suffers has attained the sublime.

Hugo on Love in a Marriage

Love is the sublime crucible in which a man and a woman melt together; the one being, the triple being, the final being, the human trinity, result. Wherever there is a real marriage, meaning where there is love, the ideal is involved. This is real bliss. There is no joy beyond these joys. Love is the sole ecstasy here. Everything else weeps. To love or to have loved is enough. Don’t ask for anything more. There is no other pearl to be found in the shadowy folds of life. To love is an achievement.

And as a digression, I give you a definition of love from “The Greatest Thing in the World” by Henry Drummand. There are nine elements of love: Patience; kindness; generosity; humility; courtesy; unselfishness; good temper; guilelessness; and sincerity.

Hugo on Poverty and Nature

Poverty in youth, when it succeeds, has this magnificent effect: It turns the whole will toward effort and the whole soul toward aspiration. Poverty immediately pares down material life and makes it hideous; hence those inexpressible yearnings for the ideal life. The rich young man has a hundred brilliant and vulgar distractions, the horse races, hunting, dogs, smoking, gambling, wining and dining, and the rest; occupations for the nether regions of the soul at the expense of the higher and more delicate regions. The poor young man has to toil for his daily bread; he eats, and when he has eaten, all he can do is dream. He gets in for nothing to the shows God puts on for him; he looks at the sky, space, the stars, the flowers, children, humanity among whom he suffers, creation in which he shines. He looks so hard at humanity, he sees its soul; he looks so hard at creation, he sees God. He dreams and he feels grand; he dreams on and he feels full of love. He goes from the self-obsession of the suffering man to the compassion of the meditative man. A wonderful feeling grows inside him, self-forgetfulness and pity for all. In thinking of the numberless pleasures nature offers, gives, and lavishes on those with open hearts–and refuses to closed hearts–he ends up feeling sorry for the millionaires of money, for he is a millionaire of the mind. All hatred goes out of his heart as all light enters his mind.

Hugo on Thinking

Thinking is the labor of the intellect, daydreaming is its sensual pleasure. To replace thinking with daydreaming is to confound poison with food.

Hugo on the True Division of Humanity (You are sad every day)

Are you what is known as a lucky man? Well, you are sad every day. Every day has its great chagrin or its small worry. Yesterday you were trembling for the health of someone dear to you ; today you fear for your own; tomorrow it will be anxiety over money, the day after tomorrow the vicious attack of some slanderer, the day after that, the misfortune of a friend; then the weather, then something broken or lost, then some pleasure that both your conscience and your spinal column hold against you; another time, the course of public affairs. Without counting all the heartaches. And on it goes. Once cloud disperses, another forms. Scarcely one day in a hundred of unbounded joy and unbounded sunshine. And you are among the happy few! As for other men, stagnant night is upon them.

Thoughtful people rarely use the terms, the happy and the unhappy. In this world, antechamber of another, evidently, there are no happy people.

The true division of humanity is this: those filled with light and those filled with darkness.

To reduce the number of those filled with darkness, to increase the number of those filled with light, that is the goal. That is why we cry: education! knowledge! science! To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable spelled out sparkles.

But when we say light we do not necessarily say joy. We suffer in the light; too much of it burns. Flames are unfriendly to wings. To burn without ceasing to fly, that is the miracle of genius.

When you learn finally to know and when you learn finally to love, you will suffer still.

Hugo on the Miserable People

As we never get tired of repeating, think, first and foremost, of the disinherited and hurting hordes, relieve them, give them air, give them light, love them, broaden their horizon magnificently, lavish all kinds of education on them, set them the example of toil, never the example of idleness, lighten the weight of the individual burden by giving more weight to the notion of the universal goal, limit poverty without limiting wealth, create vast fields of activity, public and popular, be like Briareus and have a hundred hands that can reach out on all sides to the downtrodden and the weak, put collective power to work at that great duty, which is to open workshops to all hands, schools to all aptitudes, and laboratories to all forms of intelligence, increase wages, decrease the struggle, balance debits and credits, that is, match pleasure to effort and gratification to need—in a word, make the social apparatus release more light and more comfort, for the benefit of the suffering and the ignorant. This is, let sympathetic souls not forget, the foremost of fraternal obligations, it is, let self-centered hearts be aware, the first and foremost of political necessities.

But, we have to say, this is just a start. The real issue is ths: Work cannot be a law without being a right.

Intellectual and moral growth is no less indispensable than material enrichment. Knowledge is a store of provisions; thought is a primary necessity; the truth is food the same as wheat is. An argument that abstains from science and wisdom loses weight. We should feel sorry for minds that don’t eat the way we do for stomachs. If there is something more poignant than a body dying for want of bread, it is a soul dying starved of light.

Hugo on Fraud

A letter written by a crook (Thernadier) to trick the recipient of the letter into donating money to the thief was signed, “Don Alvarez, Spanish captain of cavallery royalist refugee in France that finds himself on a voyage for his homeland and lack in funds to continue his voyage.” Cavalry is intentionally misspelled in the book in order to convey that the writer is not good at spelling.

In War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy the following passages are included:

While imprisoned in the shed Pierre had learned not with his intellect but with his whole being, by life itself, that man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfaction of simple human needs, and that all unhappiness arises not from privation but from superfluity... and that when he had put on tight dancing shoes he had suffered just as he did now when he walked with bare feet that were covered with sores.

a superfluity of the comforts of life destroys all joy in satisfying one's needs

The very qualities that had been a hindrance, if not actually harmful, to him in the world he had lived in - his strength, his disdain for the comforts of life, his absent-mindedness and simplicity - here among these people gave him almost the status of a hero.