Oh, Calliope

هل من الممكن أن تحب روحًا لم تعرفها حتى الآن؟

“When you are possessed by a dream, when you are the inhabitant of a dream, you are driven by this, by a kind of heart beating: and the dream says something that is never said, that will never be said by anyone else and which you unknow; you possess the unknown secret. It is this, not the possibility of knowing the secret, that makes you both dream and write: the beating presence of it, its feeling.”

Everytime I read Frankenstein, the same line makes me put the book down and stare at the wall. It’s my favorite line in the book; it has its own highlighter color in my annotations. The first time I read it, I literally detoured after my last class just to tell my lit teacher how much I liked the line because I couldn’t wait until second period the next day. Here’s the line: