Havin' a Look at the Thomas Hardy on a Lazy Sunday

Today is going to be a good day. This afternoon I'll be reunited with some very dear friends, but a few observations first...nice to sit back on a lazy Sunday after running 7.2 miles, eating Mom's blueberry pancakes,and finishing the Times crossword for the second week in a row. It's weird not going to church, though. I'm looking forward to joing the Episcopal community in Chicago.

My "Four Great Concerns" was not just literary fancy-shmancy. I have to walk the talk, so I began putting it into practice with my first Thomas Hardy novel, Tess of the d'Urbervilles. After reading the first phase, I can see myself becoming a Hardy fan. Besides a great tragic love story which turns around my favorite Stephen King adage--coincidence is not the exception in life, but the rule (from "The Langoliers")--it is shaping up to be a completely unified work in terms of rhetoric, structure, and style. Hardy's main concern is about human purity (Tess is a "pure woman") and thus writes in a straightforward style where his prose does not rely on elaborate comparisons to be full of imagery, he uses color symbolically, and drops a very interesting hint. His preface to the fifth edition takes pains to point out that he is not speaking of purity in the Christian sense--human purity is being true to yourself, and for Tess that means careful consideration of how to interpret life and its situations and not following others' sometimes foolish ideas (like the Durbeyfields do) or not thinking about all the considerations and being selfish (Alec Stoke...what a name!). She practices ambivalence and seeing both sides of things, which lends an extra, crucial bit of strength to the final passage of the first phase when Hardy cautiously denies the altruism of God. Belief is personal consideration...and thus human purity.

The Times had an education supplement today where they suggested your starting salary should cover your student loans, which themselves should not exceed 14% of income. Now what do you say to a man like me who has $61,000 in debt but also a bank account large enough to pay over half of it off very slowly? At least I'm young, without a family, and ready for frugality.

Country music and Cliff Richard...that's what going on my iPod the day I run a marathon.