Tess of the d'Urbervilles
A quality, depressing read. What made it depressing also became its prime allure, like a plein-air painting, it’s not that the scenery captured is beautiful, but rather the fidelity that the worldbuilder used to capture it is faithful. The story follows Tess, an ordinary farm girl, as she goes through life. It’s pretty difficult to talk about it without spoiling the main plot: in her naivety, she was manipulated and raped, bore a sickly child and lost that child, fell in love, and at the cusp of that healing, redemptive love, she revealed her past and was abandoned by her stubborn husband due to her supposed impurity. The story is tragic, and like Voltaire’s Candide it’s almost comical how tragic it is because at the end of the day, it is a contrived story. Yet despite that, smaller parts feel quite real from my own life experiences with people I’ve interacted with.
Much of Tess’s existence before several of the permanent and life-altering events happening are mundane, and to someone living quite differently, idyllic even. It gives me pause to look at the mundane nothing-going-on that consists of much of my (and everyone else’s) life as happiness, because the temporary euphoria of highs almost never outweigh the permanent scarring of life’s traumas. It’s as if euphoria is not the opposite of trauma, but rather empty null banality of everything actually is. Put concretely, one little thing, one bad decision or misstep by someone completely unrelated to me, could alter my life forever for the worse. And it’s almost unimaginable how much worse my life could be as the summation of all of the world’s diseases and pains far outweighs the sole counterweight of banal nothing-going-on-ness. So I’ve come out of it more scared of everything than before… reading it is a mortal reminder but instead of a reminder that I’ll die someday, it’s rather a reminder that I could be tortured and kept alive in far worse ways than I’ve ever been, for having done no wrong at all. Hardly a happy take, but on the flipside, at least I can say it’s not happening now, and to take whatever banality that comes as a good thing.
% grep -i "tess of the d'urbervilles" quotes.txt2 matches
on love
“Inside this exterior, over which the eye might have roved as over a thing scarcely percipient, almost inorganic, there was the record of a pulsing life which had learnt too well, for its years, of the dust and ashes of things, of the cruelty of lust and the fragility of love”
— Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles
on mortality
“She suddenly thought one afternoon, when looking in the glass at her fairness, that there was yet another date, of greater importance to her than those; that of her own death, when all these charms would have disappeared; a day which lay sly and unseen among all the other days of the year, giving no sign or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less surely there. When was it? Why did she not feel the chill of each yearly encounter with such a cold relation? She had Jeremy Taylor’s thought that some time in the future those who had known her would say: “It is the —th, the day that poor Tess Durbeyfield died”; and there would be nothing singular to their minds in the statement. Of that day, doomed to be her terminus in time through all the ages, she did not know the place in month, week, season or year”
— (Tess), Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles