Honest To God

                      Bishop John A. T. Robinson (1919-1983) redux.

Ghazal Shakeri- Song Of The Red Dervish

Andre Gide

                    You can say that again.
 

Tomb of Attar

                                         Nishapur.

J. S. Mill

 

We Remember Br. Malcolm Today

 

"Tractarian as to phraseology and Pantheistic as to essence."

 

The religiosity of Thomas Hardy's tragic heroine in Tess of the d'Urbervilles intrigues me. I won't go so far as to speculate whether or not she represents her creator's own religiosity, but his obvious love for this character gives me pause. 

In an article published in The Thomas Hardy Journal in May 1986, Ian Gregor quoted a reminiscence of Hardy published in 1938 by Ford Madox Ford: "I think one of the most memorable occasions of my life occurred when before the fair-sized house-party at Mr Clodd's at Aldeburgh, Thomas Hardy made the curiously shy avowal that he was a practising and believing communicant of the Church of England."

Gregor's article tries to reconcile this remembrance with a mid-life (1890) confession of Hardy's in his Autobiography: "I have been looking for God for 50 years, and I think if he had existed, I should have discovered him. As an external personality, of course, the only true meaning of the word."

 According to an "Explanatory Note" Hardy appended to the first edition of Tess, the novel was written in 1889. 

When it came to his personal views, Hardy tended to play his cards close to the vest: see Ralph Pite's biography, Thomas Hardy: The Guarded Life (2007).

What, then, to make of Ford's late (and I emphasize the adjective) recollection? And, given Pite's research into Hardy's autobiographical reticence, what to make of his mid-life "confession"?

I will suggest--but only suggest--that his description of Tess's religiosity (the title of these notes) may reconcile the two statements.

And leave it at that. In the end, my remarks are, at best, tangentially relevant to Hardy's artistic achievement. To borrow from Martin Luther's famous statement about God: "Let Hardy be Hardy."

Brandon Scott and Jack Caputo on "Theopoetics"

Thomas Hardy

 

When reading Thomas Hardy's fiction, be prepared to devote almost every waking moment to it until you are finished being dragged through the narrative arc of fond hopes, near misses, dashed hopes, and final tragedy that each of his novels delivers with consummate mastery.

Be prepared to be devastated. 

 

In Lady Chatterley, D. H. Lawrence (a devoted reader of Hardy) articulated with a few deft strokes a theory of the novel that I think holds its own with that of any critic. 

 

There is a scene in Chapter 9 when Connie is reflecting on Mrs. Bolton’s gossip. Lawrence interrupts the flow of her thoughts to opine on "the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead." He goes on to note that, improperly handled, the novel can descend to mere gossip.

Hardy’s novels, though veering to the edge of gossip in their subject matter, avoid that precipice and are properly handled—so properly handled that I think it fair to regard them as instruments of moral education—the best and, in my view, only authentic form of moral education outside of lived experience: one that refuses to stoop to "the vicious, conventional channeling of sympathy by Mrs. Bolton."

This in addition to his exquisite feeling for the natural world, for landscape, for architecture, and for the vast literary resources upon which Hardy drew.

 

Hardy's own sympathetic consciousness, like Lawrence's, emerged from "the vicious, conventional channeling of sympathy" that characterized so much of white, evangelical Christianity in the England of their day and, sadly, the America of ours. 

 

Though rarely recognized as such, both novelists rose above the stifling indoctrination of their early religious training to become important moralists. We should have the temerity, if not the wisdom, to read them as such.

Istanbul

                                         Nomadic Nico's blog.

The Salt of the Earth Official Trailer 1 (2015) - Documentary HD

Borges

 

Husayn ibn Mansur Triptych

 

Old Library Trinity College Dublin

                                         BE STILL MY HEART!

And All Shall Be Well

 

T. S. Eliot Reads His Four Quartets - Little Gidding