Evanston: seas of leaves
Evanston: seas of leaves
Beneath a hazy sky the temperature has risen to 92ºF this afternoon, and before gale force wind the tree tops outside our windows are seething waves. They are in constant motion, swaying, churning like surf, usually not quite breaking, though a few small branches have done so.
The wind is due to increase to 40 and 50 knots in thunderstorms this evening. Tornado warnings to the west of us.
Living here on the third floor is ideal. The top of the closest tree is even with our windows and the taller ones across the street are outlined against the sky.
Unlike lines of surf, each tree moves independently in the wind, like water in tide pools.
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I’ve finished TESS OF THE D’UBERVILLES and A CAFE ON THE NILE.
Once again Bartle Bull let me down. The last sixty pages of CAFE were a pointless chase scene which permitted him to describe some gratuitous violence, but had no suspense because you knew how it would turn out. The book also had an act of arson, as did his first one: perhaps a failure of inventive imagination.
The problem with Mr. Bull is that he can and often does write quite well or I’d just throw his books out. On the basis of the good beginning of his first book, I bought his next three used via Amazon for about $3.00 each. Even at that price I wouldn’t do so again. But now that I still have two more to go, I’ll probably give them a try. Might be good airplane books, which is such slight praise as almost to be an insult.
TESS is, of course, quite another matter. As I have mentioned, I last read it so long ago it was almost a new book to me, which brought renewed pleasure and re-enforced Hardy’s place as one of my favorite writers.
The novel, JANE EYRE, was written earlier than TESS OF THE D’UBERVILLES, but the characters were near contemporaries. While Jane Eyre is a surprisingly modern woman, more a woman of our century than her own, Tess belongs to her time. She is an innocent victim of her own physical beauty and sexual appeal, and of misunderstandings, self-righteousness, religion and social system. ‘Innocent’ she was. Jane Eyre, who is consistently described as being ‘plain’ is a more sensual woman than Tess, whose attractiveness is acknowledged by all. Calling Tess “A Pure Woman” in the subtitle is a stroke of genius--though I seldom use the word--for of course by the standards of her day she most definitely wasn’t.
The writing is often descriptively poetic, as appropriate for the poet Hardy was, and intelligent, wry and ironical. An example of the former is the penultimate scene of the novel at Stonehenge, and of the latter, a line describing how village farm labors were compelled to leave their ancestral homes, a “process, humorously designated by statisticians as ‘the tendency of the rural population towards the large towns’, being really the tendency of water to flow uphill when forced by machinery.”
I’m pleased that there is a lot more Hardy for me to reread.
Thursday, June 7, 2007