Mugtoe
Cuddly Puppy
Registered: Oct 2001
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The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy
quote:
As the lively and sparkling emotions of her early married life cohered into an equable serenty, the finer movements of her nature found scope in discovering to the narrow-lived ones around her the secret (as she had once learnt it) of making limited opportunities endurable; which she deemed to consist in the cunning enlargement by a species of microscopic treatment, even to the magnitude of positive pleasure, those minute forms of satisfaction that offer themselves to everybody not in positive pain; which, thus handled, have much of hte same inspiriting effect upon life as wider interests cursorily embraced.
Thomas Hardy amazes me sometimes. All through this book I was struck by his insight and found myself identifying with Henchard and Elizabeth-Jane. This passage in particular about the girl describes to a T the way that I survived some of the darkest moments of my life.
quote:
But the ingenious machinery contrived by the gods for reducing human possibilities of amelioration to a minimum - which arranges that wisdom to do shall come pari passu with the departure of zest for doing - stood in the way of all that. He had no wish to make an arena a second time of a world that had become a mere painted scene to him.
I'm startled when I read stuff like that.
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06-19-2003 01:35 PM
