Day 9: Visitation to Hardy's home.

We visited, briefly, the home of Thomas Hardy. It was located in a remote and rural area, far from the lifestyles and mentality of metropolitan peoples. Mrs. Barrington suggested I read Jude the Obscure due to it's rivaling pessimism and dauntless proposition about the inevitability of irrationality in the world. It is this ethos in him that causes his most beautiful works, I am sure; it is through his struggles, conflicts, and contempt, that he brilliantly composes his overcoming. In other words, he is victorious over his struggles by employing them creatively, in poetry and fictional works, through which he cognizes and thereupon subordinates his issues into an intelligible theme. For example, one variable I found operating within the location of Hardy's home and his novel Jude the Obscure was isolation. More precisely, within these two subjects one percieves the resentful isolating of oneself from society as a means of affirming ones existence. I am, of course, referring to how Jude, an active mind, is cruelly nurtured by the monotonous, uneventful, and decadent countenance of his home village. These entities, which are themselves continuous throughout various landscapes Jude explores, help explain Jude's idealistic reactions to the few comforting thoughts in his life; he is neurotically-ecstatic when small, hopeful ideas such as Christminster come to mind because they allow him a personal foreground upon which he can finally build and evolve his person. Thus, from a lack of individual feedback from the world, Jude isolated his mentality from reality in order to feel comfortable.
It would have been different, I think, if Jude was set in a city. Dostoevsky's Raskalnikov was set in a city, yet, he isolated himself not from lack of experience, but his surfeit with experiences. Jude's disposition, which was obscure to his home society and even wife, was so far removed from reality because it had little to offer him. Therefore, his idealistic and lofty mood towards life, which sets the foundation of his character in the book, was his shelter from the outside world. How coincidental that the location of Hardy's home should leave the same impression; that Hardy should retreat far from his enemies, and build his walls high, so as not to endure their clamor. Even so, I sense a recognition, both in Jude and the isolation of Hardy's home, of the outside world challenging the individual; just outside the walls of his ideals the screaming and pounding of reality is heard. As the walls crumble, so they must be laboriously rebuilt from the clay and rocks deep within. This, I feel, is the basis for the deconstruction of Jude inner sense of idealism.
Moreover, I do not think such perspicacious literature could be written without that deep sense of struggle endured by Hardy. I see it in his home, set far and in resentment of his enemies (i.e. industrialism, utilitarianism, expansionism, and other demiurges that had been revealed by Mrs. Barrington that day), and in Jude the Obscure. In short, a discrepancy between individual and reality is unanimous among Hardy and Jude.