To err is but human

The human race is a flawed creation. Nothing is perfect, the characteristics, the very nature is riddled with faults – minute or evident – that we have to live with. Even Jesus Christ as a man had his own shortcomings, which was far from the divine.

Where am I going with all these? It is all because I am currently reading a new book, which my husband bought for me for the very first time since we've known each other. I am reading Philip Roth's The Human Stain, which was made into a film starring Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman, which I never got to watch.

I can't tell you the plot because I have only read up to the end of the first chapter, a very long one actually, 74 pages in all its glory and consider that its size isn't your normal paperback issue. I met four major characters and each one has their own little secret. What really excites me is the way it was written. Passages are brilliant that at times I went over through them again and again and gape in awe of its magnificence.

Let us meet Coleman Silk, an arrogant seventy-one year-old man, the dean of a college that ostracized him for a racist comment he had unknowingly uttered. Silk is carrying out a secret affair with a thirty-four year-old cleaning woman named, Faunia Farley. Beautiful and uneducated – one who once belong to the bourgeois class, whose life began crumbling down after her parents' divorce, who was fondled by her step-father the very day he first arrived, who ran away when she was fourteen and married at twenty to a Vietnam veteran farmer who regularly beat her up, and whose two kids had dies on a fire. Her ex-husband is Les Farley, who was still after her believing that their kids' death was caused by Faunia’s negligence. Les is a man who was trained to kill and knew nothing else. And lastly, we had the narrator, Nate Zuckerman, whose prostate had been removed because of cancer – which had left him incontinent.

So what is the human stain? Is it fundamental in our nature? I believe so, though we were shaped into different molds – with different intrinsic qualities. We've all got weaknesses, deficiencies or imperfections that we all have to try to overcome while facing moral dilemmas that could mold us into a more unique creation. The question is, would you suffer and would it result to your destruction?