Jude the Acherontic

Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer? 🤭

Remember that the best and greatest among mankind are those who do themselves no worldly good. 

Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy 

Learned a new word today. Rhadamanthine. To show stern and inflexible judgment. 

And another. Acherontic. An adjective describing something as dark, dismal, gloomy, or Infernal, often evoking a sense of death or the underworld. It is derived from the Greek mythological river Acheron and signifies a profound, hopeless sorrow or a pitch black atmosphere. 

And there you have the whole atmospheric canvas of Jude the Obscure; for, my goodness, this novel is grim and gloomy indeed, and rather shockingly so, in my mind anyway, for a novel published in 1894. 

And it is all rather wonderfully, astoundingly done. 

I wonder if anyone has ever counted the occurrences of the word obscure or its various forms through the pages of the novel. Surely someone has, I think. And then there are the many synonyms as well. Hardy has planted these throughout the text, and quite artfully so, I thought; gradually, though ceaselessly, adding darkness and dimness and gloom and fog and storm in ever heavier shades.

Only 50 pages or so remaining now. What else could go wrong? Much, I suspect, if the preceding 300 are any clue.

Tragic Comedy

'But it seems such a terribly tragic thing to bring beings into the world--so presumptuous--that I question my right to do it sometimes!'

--Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy 

My girlfriend has often expressed the same general thought--that the world now is such a terrible, tragic place that it calls into question whether she should have ever agreed to bear children. Why has God made such a world, she wonders, wherein tragedy and disaster thrive? 

Well, if it is any comfort, we can see from the Hardy quote that the world now is not any worse than the world of the mid 19th century; and one may safely assume that it never has been much good. Especially if one is acquainted with history and literature. So if misery loves company, this has been a long, long affair.

By extension then, we can appreciate the soundness of scripture when it says: God is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Always terribly tragic, I guess 😉😅

Of course the key to the issue, theologically anyway, is that the good world that God created ended with original sin and the fall from grace. Since that time, it has been pretty much of a dumpster fire. Our eyes and our minds are therefore rightly set upon things above, things beyond, even as we struggle through things as they are. 

She doesn't believe that last part. She wants God to fix things now. This crappy world was his fault to begin with, she figures, and he should have done it right in the first place, or not at all! 😅

obscurity

All laughing comes from misapprehension. Rightly looked at there is no laughable thing under the sun. 

'Well, now we have met, come along,' she returned, ready to quarrel with the sun for shining on her. And they left the tent together, this pot-bellied man and florid woman, in the antipathetic, recriminatory mood of the average husband and wife of Christiandom. 

Just a couple of sober jewels from the relentlessly somber novel, Jude the Obscure. A careful menace of fate hangs over every chapter, and when the sun breaks through it is fragile, momentary, a passing illusion of a life that might be but never will be. A darkness of ill-advised passions lingers always in the background, just beyond the illusory parting of the clouds. 

I'm loving it! 😅

I am also back now from Lovina, the land of dreadful humidity, and having spent a few additional lovely, breezy, sunshiny south Bali days with Evelyn, I am now on my own again and having to readjust to her absence. 

There seems a sort of sad harmony with Jude the Obscure--a synchronicity that so often happens in the intersection of literature and life. My own thoughts pop up in the novel, and the novel pops up in the fabric of my life, and there is no laughable thing under the sun. I am plucked out of time and plunked down in the midst of paradise lost. Paradise, yes; but lost already. 

But ah well, I am content as long as contentment shines. To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.

More from Lovina

Aching in Lovina

Spending a few days in Lovina, North Bali, now and generally suffering from the high humidity. I wondered if humidity has a bad effect on arthritis, and so I looked it up, finding on Google that: 

High humidity often has a bad effect on arthritis, frequently increasing joint pain, stiffness, and swelling. Rising humidity can cause bodily tissues to expand and fluids in the joints to thicken, resulting in greater discomfort and flares.

Jeeze. 

Felt like I was being run over by a train all night long, slept very little, and was unable to join Evelyn and other guests for an early morning dolphin watching excursion. 

Oh well, I can see it on their videos 😉

Just coming from south Bali to North Bali entails a trying trip on two lane roads which wind up the mountains and then wind back down again in a constant corkscrewing through hairpin turns. Happily, I don't have a driver's license anymore and have not driven a car in some 10 years, so Evelyn drove and was bailed out at the halfway mark by her daughter Michelle. 

Lovina is much, much less developed than the southern tourist areas and therefore much less crowded, which would be nice if the stifling humidity could be removed from the experience. As it is, I will be glad to be headed back to Sanur.

The Writing on the Wall

Learned a new word today. 

Dermatographia. 

This I learned in the course of searching Google for the cause of instant red streaks on my skin whenever I have an itch somewhere. I mean that after scratching that itch, though not vigorously or anything like that, these bright red lines appear, sometimes with little darker spots along the way, like a modern art painting on a pink canvas. 

The common, non-technical, more descriptive term for dermatographia is "skin writing" . 

My goodness, how appropriate. I've always wanted to be a writer, and now it's as easy as scratching an itch. 

Unfortunately, skin writing presents in some kind of a mysterious code or ancient language. I don't know what it says. 

Yet. 

It is the writing on the wall, and I am the wall.

Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin.

The sounds of silence. 

I am a rock, I am an island.

These scarlet lines and doodles appear almost instantly upon scratching an itch and then disappear within minutes. It's like writing a novel without any knowledge of the story you're telling, for it disappears almost as quickly as its composed. 

In the Book of Daniel, chapter 5, we learn that ...

Suddenly the fingers of a human hand appeared and wrote on the plaster of the wall, near the lampstand in the royal palace. The king watched the hand as it wrote. His face turned pale and he was so frightened that his legs became weak and his knees were knocking.

Well, the hand is mine, and my legs are always weak and my knees always knocking, so scripture doesn't seem to help very much in this instance. 

It appears that the book of the scarlet scratches must remain locked for the time being, lacking, as I do, a wise man to interpret the writings. I  do know a dog who is pretty smart, but of course he does not speak English, or any other human language.

But a rock feels no pain, and an island never cries, nor do these scratches hurt or weep,

and therefore am I content to search the mystery whenever I have an itch to do so.

Jude the Obscure (thus far)

The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. 

--Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy 

We writers, even we washed up ones, have a thing about first lines. 

Such as this: 

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

And this: 

None of them knew the color of the sky. 

And this one: 

Call me Ishmael. 

I like that quoted above as well, from Jude the Obscure. 

Why? you ask. It's quite simple. It's hardly earth-shaking. 

Well, because it's music. And it echoes throughout the terrain of the narrative. It is the first stitch and all the rest of the garment spreads out from there. 

Why make a point of calling you Ishmael? What's in a name? 

Much.

Why did none of them know the color of the sky? 

Why were people sorry to see the schoolmaster go? 

Anyway, I'm about a third of the way into Jude the Obscure now, inspired by my recent reading of Far from the Madding Crowd to read more of Thomas Hardy. I actually read Jude some years ago (well, many years ago) but I remember very little about the story (which is not surprising, given the decaying quality of my mind). 

Jude is a much different novel from Far from the Madding Crowd, having in common only locale, that region of Wessex preferred in most of the Hardy novels. But other than that, the tone here is heavy and lacking the mischievous humor of Far from the Madding Crowd, although it does pick up a thread (there's that stitch again!) from the former--call it love and disaster😉 That's pretty clear from the quote from the Book of Esdras that Hardy places on the front page of the novel: 

Yea, many there be that have run out of their wits for women, and become servants for their sakes. Many also have perished, have erred, and sinned, for women .... O ye men, how can it be but women should be strong, seeing they do this?

What! Misogyny again? 

Well blame it on Esdras. Or on the original trespass. It is in any case a thread that has been often sewn.