What does this mad myth signify?

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary
Like Love in the Time of Cholera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being is an unconventional* love story. We follow the lives of several pairings of lovers, blending their perspectives on life, death, love, and everything in between. The Prague Spring and Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia provide the backdrop to our story, and its personal and political ramifications play out in the lives of the characters. Kundera paints a contemplative portrait of existence, and his protagonists illustrate his metaphysical musings.

* As in Cholera, love flows not simply from one person to another but from one, to another, to a third, back to the first, and so on and so on. Below is a breakdown of the various marriages and affairs by pairing:

{Tereza + [Tomas} + {Sabina] + [Franz} + Marie-Claude]
Spoiler Over: Continue Here


I really enjoyed this novel, though I wasn't sure what I would think of it at first. My sister, Diana, was less than whelmed by it, and we traditionally have similar tastes, but as always, I tried to open my mind and heart to the book, and when I did, I was pleasantly surprised. Kundera strikes a tender balance between the philosophical treatise and traditional novel, and his characters flesh out his mental quandaries in a way that I found organic and beautiful. Like Cholera, I'd suggest patience with this one if you're planning to read or have read and didn't get through. It took time for me to feel out the flow of it, and its rhythm was not immediately apparent.

- On this life being our only go-round
"We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come." Kundera comes back to this theme with some frequency. I loved the idea that we can't weigh our lives against other versions of them, or make changes and try again, because this is the only one we have. 

- On compassion
"Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes." Tomas is tortured by Tereza's bad dreams at one point, and realizes that he could withstand violence against the rest of the country and the world (to his horror) but her grief and pain from her dreams is unbearable.

- Reading a book is the best first move
"He had an open book on his table. In Tereza's eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood." Tereza falls for Tomas when he's the only one reading at the restaurant she works at. I loved this moment because more often than not, I'm the one with my nose in a book. Maybe all I need to do to find my Tomas is read at restaurants more often! ;)

- On cutting novels some slack and seeing the small things in our own lives more
"It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences (like the meeting of Anna, Vronsky, the railway station, and death or the meeting of Beethoven, Tomas, Tereza, and the cognac), but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty." Kundera points out that while novels seem to be rife with coincidences and fortuitous events, our own lives possess them as well, and in our need to see novels as fiction, we preclude ourselves from seeing the chance moments in our own lives. Open your eyes to these moments more - maybe you'll be surprised by their poignancy!

- On the Russian invasion
-- "Photographers...preserve the face of violence for the distant future." I loved this line - Tereza and Sabina are both photographers, and they record the events of the Prague Spring and Russian invasion. In today's world, photographs are an assumed artifact of our existence; they provide incontrovertible proof of an event's occurrence. What would we believe more deeply from 200 or 2,000 years ago if we had photographs of everything? Might those photographs keep us from repeating mistakes?
-- "The Russian invasion was not only a tragedy; it was a carnival of hate filled with a curious (and no longer explicable) euphoria."
-- "It is a tragicomic fact that our proper upbringing has become an ally of the secret police. We do not know how to lie." The political upheaval of Prague was intertwined with the characters' lives in an understated, yet fascinating way. I thought this line was a perfect illustration of Kundera's self-reflective narration and this pairing of the personal and political.

- Living abroad
"Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has his family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known from childhood." I found this such a poignant depiction of living in another country - when I lived in France, I felt much like Tereza after she moved to Switzerland. I've often bemoaned the fact that among other things, I lost my sense of humor - I wasn't fluent enough in French to be funny, or tell a humorous story. It's a tenuous balance, blending the joy of experiencing such newness and feeling so removed from the familiar.

- 'Words Misunderstood'
Kundera includes a "words misunderstood" section to describe the disconnect in Franz and Sabina's relationship. It was one of my favorite parts of the novel. Here's an example:

cemetery 

• Sabina: "When the sun goes down, the cemetery sparkles with tiny candles. It looks as though the dead are dancing at a children's ball... No matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery...against a backdrop of blue hills, they were as beautiful as a lullaby." This is how I feel about cemeteries. I still remember Père Lachaise in Paris and its meandering elegance, the gatekeeper for the likes of Balzac, Chopin, Modigliani, and Proust.

• Franz: "For Franz, a cemetery was an ugly dump of stones and bones."

Later, after they've separated, Sabina comes to see Franz's point of view on things more, and Kundera writes:
"Perhaps if they had stayed together longer, Sabina and Franz would have begun to understand the words they used. Gradually, timorously, their vocabularies would have come together, like bashful lovers, and the music of one would have begun to intersect with the music of the other." What an exquisite sentence.

- Karenin (love, and a bit wiv a dog)
Hands down, the most heartbreaking moment (SPOILER ALERT! I know, it's out of place - Sorry!) was when Karenin, Tomas and Tereza's dog, dies. They euthanize him at home, and the last few weeks they share with him as he's dying are heartrending. Here are a few of my favorite lines about him (actually, he's a she, but they decide that Karenin is the most appropriate fit for him from Anna K, which Tereza was reading at the time. I don't know anyone that gives a pet the wrong gendered name (AHEM. Harvey.):

- "Lately, Tereza realized, she positively enjoyed being welcomed into the day by Karenin. Waking up was sheer delight for him: he always showed a naïve and simple amusement at the discovery that he was back on earth; he was sincerely pleased. She, on the other hand, awoke with great reluctance, with a desire to stave off the day by keeping her eyes closed." This is exactly how I feel about my cat, Suzy. She's delighted to get up each day, if for no other reason than to badger me into consciousness, while I (and my chronic sleep apnea) feel a bit more like this Brad Pitt line from Ocean's Twelve: "Are you suicidal?" "Only in the morning."

- "Her home was Karenin, not Tomas. Who would wind the clock of their days when he was gone?" When Tomas and Tereza were getting ready to put Karenin down (Tomas is a doctor until he's forced to abandon his career due to persecution by the secret police), it reminded me of a time I took Suzy to the vet about a year ago. I was sitting in the waiting room with her in her travel carrier, and when I looked across the lobby, I saw a couple holding their cat in their laps. I was confused, and immediately thought that maybe they were a new-agey couple, and that they felt the carrier was too confining for their kitty. I didn't think much more of it, and went in with Suzy for her appointment. When I came out toting Suzy, the couple was standing next to the receptionist and weeping. Their arms were empty. Only then did I realize that they didn't bring a carrier because they were bringing their cat to be put down. On the way back home, I told Suzy profusely how much I loved her, and how sorry I felt for that couple. I also promptly told my rooommate, Josh, how great it was that that would never be a problem with Suzy because she was Never Going to Die. (#isn'tdenialthebest?) I Could tell you that I didn't weep uncontrollably when Karenin died. I could Also tell you I have three heads and a million dollars in the bank.

- On characters
Like Proust, Kundera pontificates about writing while he's writing. Some people probably find this very pretentious, but I find it's the moment when I feel most connected to an author. Here are a few of my favorite moments like this from the book:
--"Characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about."
--"The characters in my novels are all my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented."

Sentences that struck me:

• "Tomas lived under the hypnotic spell cast by the excruciating beauty of Tereza's dreams."

• "Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love."

• "The beauty of New York rests on a completely different base. It's unintentional. It arose independent of human design, like a stalagmitic cavern." -- in other words, "Beauty by mistake."

• "What does it mean to live in truth?"

In the last scene of the book, we experience the night before Tomas and Tereza die. (Sorry, I know I'm spoiling all over the place. It's no use crying over spoiled spoiler alerts, now is it?) We know they're going to die because we've already heard the news earlier in the novel, and Tereza suspects that their end is near. It was one of my favorite moments in the novel, so I'll leave you with it.

"On they danced to the strains of the piano and violin. Tereza leaned her head on Tomas's shoulder. Just as she had when they flew together in the airplane through the storm clouds. She was experiencing the same odd happiness and the odd sadness as then. The sadness meant: we are at the last station. The happiness meant: we are together."

Onwards to Hocus Pocus, Practical Magic, pumpkins and midnight margaritas! I'll be back with An Invocation for Lewis Nicepants. Adieu!

Little by little the fragrance of Fermina Daza became less frequent and less intense, and at last it remained only in white gardenias.

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary
Love in the Time of Cholera is a love story, but not in the traditional sense. It spans decades (over half a century, in fact) and tells both of the all-consuming passion of the bloom of young love and the more subdued, but no less powerful magnetism of companionship and shared lifetimes. We follow the lives of Fermina Daza, a young daughter of a sketchy businessman in South America, Florentino Ariza, the eclectic son of a notions merchant, and Dr. Juvenal Urbino, a second-generation aristocrat and enterprising doctor. The book begins with the death of Dr. Urbino after nearly 50 years of marriage to Fermina Daza, and traces back to the love affair between Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza that predates her marriage, and begins anew after her husband's death. Love emerges in both classic and entirely unexpected ways, in various iterations and permutations. The end result is not, therefore, a straightforward, linear tale of two lovers, but a stunning portrayal of love in all its forms.
Spoiler Over: Continue Here

I loved this book. If you know me personally and you've chatted with me while I was reading the earlier stages of the book, you know that I wasn't wild about it when I first started it. But, much like Hemingway's novels, the book crept up on me. The language was undeniably magnificent, and the imagery sublime, but it wasn't until over halfway through that I felt the poignant tenderness of Florentino Ariza's unswerving passion for Fermina Daza, and her complicated path of maturity and journey to motherhood and beyond. If you haven't read it, I'd highly recommend it. I do recommend you enter into the book with an open mind, and perhaps even more importantly, a good dose of patience.

- Dr. Urbino's library (#iwantit)
"But no other room displayed the meticulous solemnity of the library, the sanctuary of Dr. Urbino until old age carried him off. There, all around his father's walnut desk and the tufted leather easy chairs, he had lined the walls and even the windows with shelves behind glass doors, and had arranged in an almost demented order the three thousand volumes bound in identical calfskin with his initials in gold on the spines. Unlike the other rooms, which were at the mercy of noise and foul winds from the port, the library always enjoyed the tranquillity and fragrance of an abbey." As a side-note, Florentino Ariza is also an avid reader, but since he isn't as well off as Dr. Urbino until much later in his life, it says Florentino lovingly sewed his novels into cardboard covers. What a sweetheart. <3 adorable="" i="">

- Universality
I am always most struck by the moments in books that seem piercingly relevant to life today. Dr. Urbino and Fermina Daza have a big fight after several very calm years of marriage, and, as is often the case, the fight is not over anything substantial, but in fact, over whether or not Fermina Daza had remembered to restock the soap. I loved the moment when, after an extended period of being confined to another room each night, Dr. Urbino falls asleep on their bed, and when Fermina Daza tries to shake him awake and send him off, he finally relents, and just mumbles, "Let me stay here, there was soap." :)

- Florentino Ariza, when he sees Fermina Daza on Christmas Eve
"In the din of fireworks and native drums, of colored lights in the doorways and the clamor of the crowd yearning for peace, Florentino Ariza wandered like a sleepwalker until dawn, watching the fiesta through his tears, dazed by the hallucination that it was he and not God who had been born that night."

- Love without speaking (Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza (the first time around)
"It was the year they fell into devastating love. Neither one could do anything except think about the other, dream about the other, and wait for letters with the same impatience they felt when they answered them. Never in that delirious spring, or in the following year, did they have the opportunity to speak to each other."Can you imagine falling in love with someone in this day and age and not being able to speak to them for over a year? 

- Soul crushing agony - when young Fermina Daza rejects young Florentino Ariza
"Now, instead of the commotion of love, she felt the abyss of disenchantment. In an instant the magnitude of her own mistake was revealed to her, and she asked herself, appalled, how she could have nurtured such a chimera in her heart for so long and with so much ferocity. She just managed to think: My God, poor man! Florentino Ariza smiled, tried to say something, tried to follow her, but she erased him from her life with a wave of her hand."  and later, "Today when I saw you, I realized that what is between us is nothing more than an illusion." I died a little in my heart when this happened. I knew the passion of their youthful amour was too effusive to last, but I never expected her to totally rescind her affection! 

- 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days
is how long Florentino Ariza waits to re-confess his love for Fermina Daza. I'm not sure there's anything in my life I would wait 51 years for. Maybe if you told me I could have a million dollars in 51 years, or a super-fantastic house, or a multi-year vacation across the globe. But still, I'm not sure. 51 years is a Long, Long time.

- Fermina Daza's cousin, Hildebranda, on meeting the newly spurned Florentino Ariza
"He is ugly and sad, but he is all love." possibly my favorite description of a protagonist ever.

Florentino Ariza's appearance: "The only area in which he persisted in defying time and fashion was in his somber attire, his anachronistic frock coats, his unique hat, the poet's string ties from his mother's notions shop, his sinister umbrella." I could just picture Florentino Ariza, standing in today's relentless rain, staring back at me and clutching his sinister umbrella.

- Letters from Florentino
"This was the period when he spent his free time int he Arcade of the Scribes, helping unlettered lovers to write their scented love notes, in order to unburden his heart of all the words of love that he could not use in customs reports." Florentino has too much love to know what to do with, so he starts writing love letters for other people. Amusingly enough, this leads to him writing both sides of some love affairs:
 "and so it was that he became involved in a feverish correspondence with himself."hehe, oh, Florentino. such a romantic!

- Florentino, on a love letter wooing Fermina Daza after the death of her husband
"It had to be a mad dream, one that would give her the courage she would need to discard the prejudices of a class that had not always been hers but had become hers more than anyone's. It had to teach her to think of love as a state of grace: not the means to anything but the alpha and omega, an end in itself."

- Love is love at any age. Take that, Ofelia!
Ofelia Urbino Daza (Fermina Daza and Dr. Urbino's daughter), to her brother, on her mother's late blooming affection for Florentino Ariza: "Love is ridiculous at our age, but at theirs it is revolting."

Fermina Daza's response: "The only thing that hurts me is that I do not have the strength to give you the beating you deserve for being insolent and evil-minded. But you will leave this house right now, and I swear to you on my mother's grave that you will not set foot in it again as long as I live." that's right, Fermina Daza! you tell her!

- On Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza
Fermina Daza, and Florentino's hope that she may have room to love him after all his waiting: "She began to speak of her dead husband in the present tense, as if he were alive, and Florentino Ariza knew then that for her, too, the time had come to ask herself with dignity, with majesty, with an irrepressible desire to live, what she should do with the love that had been left behind without a master."

- Don't worry, it's not cholera - it's love
When Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza finally get together (in their seventies), they sail on a riverboat full of companions. The trip to their destination is fine (they're in the early stages of companionship), but they're horrified by the public nature of the audience they would need to share their love with on their return, so Florentino Ariza, who runs the riverboat company, tells the captain to fly the boat home with a cholera flag (which suggests the ship is quarantined, and would require only Florentino Ariza, Fermina Daza, and critical crew members on the ship).
- "If such things were done for so many immoral, even contemptible reasons, Florentino Ariza could not see why it would not be legitimate to do them for love."
- "During the day they played cards, ate until they were bursting, took gritty siestas that left them exhausted, and as soon as the sun was down the orchestra began to play, and they had anisette with salmon until they could eat and drink no more." sounds perfect to me!

My favorite passage in the whole book, on Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza together (at last) in their seventies:
"It was as if they had leapt over the arduous calvary of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love. They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love. For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death."

Particularly Pleasing Passages

• "In summer an invisible dust as harsh as red-hot chalk was blown into even the best-protected corners of the imagination by mad winds that took the roofs off the houses and carried away children through the air."

• on Florentino Ariza's serenades: "One of his favorite spots was the paupers' cemetery, exposed to the sun and the rain on an indigent hill, where turkey buzzards dozed and the music achieved a supernatural resonance. Later he learned to recognize the direction of the winds, and in this way he was certain that his melody carried as far as it had to."

• on daily life at a brothel where Florentino made an unusual number of friends (just regular friends, readers - he had plenty of special friends while he waited for Fermina Daza, but oddly enough not at the brothel): "It was a daily fiesta that lasted until dusk, when the naked women marched, singing, toward the bathrooms, asked to borrow soap, toothbrushes, scissors, cut each other's hair, dressed in borrowed clothes, painted themselves like lugubrious clowns, and went out to hunt the first prey of the night. Then life in the house became impersonal and dehumanized, and it was impossible to share in it without paying."

• on Fermina Daza and her father's return home from their journey: "Fermina Daza was no longer the only child, both spoiled and tyrannized by her father, but the lady and mistress of an empire of dust and cobwebs that could be saved only by the strength of invincible love."

• Dr. Juvenal Urbino, trying to fall asleep the night after his return 'home' from school in Paris: "He was tormented by the hallucinating screams of the madwomen in the Divine Shepherdess Asylum next door, the harsh dripping from the water jar into the washbasin which resonated throughout the house, the long-legged steps of the curlew wandering in his bedroom, his congenital fear of the dark, and the invisible presence of his dead father in the vast sleeping mansion."

• "Then there was such a diaphanous silence that despite the disorder of the birds and the syllables of water on stone, one could hear the desolate breath of the sea."

• "From time to time, fragments of fugitive voices escaped through open balconies, bedroom confidences, sobs of love magnified by phantasmal acoustics and the hot fragrance of jasmine in the narrow, sleeping streets."

• on Fermina Daza and Dr. Urbino's marriage: "Together they had overcome the daily incomprehension, the instantaneous hatred, the reciprocal nastiness and fabulous flashes of glory in the conjugal conspiracy."

• "The wind from the Caribbean blew in the windows along with the racket made by the birds, and Fermina Daza felt in her blood the wild beating of her free will."

May you feel your free will beating in your blood and feel the wind at your back. Onwards to The Intolerable Heaviness of Existence. Join me if you please!

Why didn't you tell me there was danger in men-folk?

Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary
Tess is your classic boy meets girl, they fall in love, live happily ever after tale. Okay, that's a big fat lie. Here are the twists:

Once upon a time in the bucolic English countryside a hundred or so years ago...
Girl meets Boy #1 (a.k.a. Slimy Bad Boy).
Boy #1 has his way with Girl (non-consensually, if you get my gist); Girl gets preggo-my-Eggo.
SCAN-Dal.
Girl has baby, it's super-cute, it dies. (I know, Sad!)
Girl starts a new life as a dairymaid.
Girl meets Boy #2 (a.k.a. Sometimes Nice and Sometimes Really Mean Boy).
Boy #2 woos Girl, eventually asks her to marry him.
Girl wants to resist (being a shamed woman and all) but can't (he's So Nice!), and eventually agrees.
Girl marries Boy #2.
They're happy for one hot minute.
Then Girl decides she needs to tell Boy #2 about Boy #1.
Boy #2 becomes Sometimes Really Mean Boy.
Boy deserts girl and heads to Brazil. (Yes. I said Brazil.)
Girl becomes destitute and works on a manual labor farm.
Boy #1 returns and slimily slimes his way back into Girl's life while Boy #2 is off gallivanting in Brazil.
Girl can only take so much poverty and sadness; Girl agrees to 'marry' Boy #1.
Boy #2 finally comes to his senses and races back from Brazil to reclaim his love.
SURPRISE! It. is. too. late.
Girl is angry at Boy #2 for waiting so long, and angry at Boy #1 for convincing her Boy #2 was never coming back.
Problem Solved! Girl murders Boy #2 (Psycho-style) and runs off to be with Boy #1.
Girl and Boy #1 get to be happy vagabonds for all of 4 or 5 days.
Girl is apprehended.
Girl is hanged for her crime. (Crime doesn't pay, folks.)
Spoiler Over: Continue Here

Wasn't that just the most upLifting thing you've ever read? I read such happy novels! In all seriousness, I loved re-reading Tess. It was one of my favorite books in high school (read it in Mrs. Brown's AP Lit class) and it definitely held up on second reading. I will not apologize for the length of this blog (I will not apoloGize for what I have aWoken in you, Sookie!) because it is a testament to the quality of Hardy's writing. Read it all the way through or don't. No one's forcing you. ;)

If you haven't read Tess, I strongly suggest you run out and a grab a copy. Even if you just read the whole spoiler above. Hardy's descriptions are lyrically brilliant, and his characters foster a fragile affection that will tug on even the stiffest of heart strings.

- Ladies in white/May Day at Bryn Mawr
When Tess first meets Angel (Boy #2) she's dancing in a country festival with other girls from the town and they're all wearing white. This reminded me of May Day at Bryn Mawr and fun times with Halley Cody and Mar Monroe. :)

- Country dance
"When she came close and looked in she beheld indistinct forms racing up and down to the figure of the dance, the silence of their footfalls arising from their being overshoe in 'scroff' - that is to say, the powdery residuum from the storage of peat and other products, the stirring of which by their turbulent feet created the nebulosity that involved the scene. Through this floating, fusty débris of peat and hay, mixed with the perspirations and warmth of the dancers, and forming together a sort of vegeto-human pollen, the muted fiddles feebly pushed their notes, in marked contrast to the spirit with which the measure was trodden out." I loved the 'vegeto-human pollen' line. Doesn't it just make you want to be at the dance, dancing with them?

- A euphemism a bit Too successful at vagueness
The first time I read Tess, I missed the rape scene. I remember asking my mom the next day - how can Tess be pregnant? When did she have sex? I was curious to re-read it this time around to see if it was any clearer to me. SURPRISE! It was not. Here are some of the context clues from which one is to surmise that a rape has occurred:

- "Might some say, where was Tess's guardian angel?"
- "Doubtless some of Tess D'Urberville's mailed ancestors rollicking home from a fray had dealt the same measure even more ruthlessly toward peasant girls of their time."

Is it just me, or is that not enTirely clear? The only real way to be sure is that the first section is called "The Maiden" and the second section is called "Maiden No More". Okay, Hardy. NOW I get it.

- Asking for it
I liked this interchange between Alec (Boy #1, aka Slimy Bad Boy) and Tess after the fact:

Tess: "I didn't understand your meaning till it was too late."
Alec: "That's what every woman says."
Tess: "Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says some women may feel?"

I was struck by how similar the language around rape was 100 years ago to the debate today. In some ways, we've come a long way as a society, but conversations about women "asking for it" are still unfortunately a part of the conversation. Tess strikes a balance between taking the expected line of action and standing strong against convention, which is probably why I find her so likable.

- Hymns
Tess remarks that she likes going to church not for the preaching, but for the music. This resonated with me - I've always enjoyed the hymns and the rituals more than the sermonizing. Sometimes our organist even lets my play the bass-notes on the foot pedals and the whole church shakes. She's such a nice lady. ;) (I just wrote foot petals by accident, and then snorted as I tried to imagine an organ made entirely of flowers.)

- One with nature
"But this encompassment of her own characterization, based on shreds of convention, peopled by phantoms and voices antipathetic to her, was a sorry and mistaken creation of Tess's fancy - a cloud of moral hobgoblins by which she was terrified without reason. It was they that were out of harmony with the actual world, not she. Walking among the sleeping birds in the hedges, watching the skipping rabbits on a moonlit warren, or standing under a pheasant-laden bough, she looked upon herself as a figure of Guilt intruding into the haunts of Innocence. But all the while she was making a distinction where there was no difference. Feeling herself in antagonism she was quite in accord. She had been made to break an accepted social law, but no law known to the environment in which she fancied herself such an anomaly."

Hardy argues that Tess feels herself as an aberration and object of shame not because she is, but because society has told her so. I loved this line about how nature sees no such distinction, even if religion and convention do.

- Concatenation
This is the first time I've seen this word used in a non-Excel context. There's a way to group together items from different cells in Excel (I know, Dull Dull God I'm so Dull!) that's called the "concatenate" function. It always makes me laugh to see it written out, because one of my co-workers insists on referring to it as "conCoctenating". "Did you concoctenate those cells?" Yes, I combined the cells and made a Sweet elixir from them. haghaghaghahagh.

- Animal death at the hands of the reaper
There are various descriptions of farming activities and duties throughout the novel, and the harvest is depicted in great detail. I was dismayed to read the description of the concentric process of reaping, and how layer after layer was reaped until only the animals hiding beneath the grains were left and then were ground by the reaper. I don't mind so much about the rats (ICK ICK ICK) but I thought of my rabbit friends from Watership Down and I hoped that they were off safe in another warren.

- Intro
Generally speaking, I don't read introductions at the beginning of books. For one thing, they almost always give away things from the plot. (Hell-oo! This is the Beginning of the book, silly! Not the end!) For another, they usually have a point of view about the book, and I find it difficult to separate their opinions and thoughts and criticisms from the text itself (I know, I'm such a deconstructionist. Le sigh.)

Anyway, for those reasons I ignored the intro at the beginning of my copy of Tess. When I came back to flip through the book to make notes for my blog, I read the beginning of the intro and was pleasantly surprised by the caliber of the writing. I found this line particularly striking:

"Some books, the best ones, have a soul; they offer a world view so complete, its mystery is inviolable. They reach us like an embrace before we know we need it; a philosophical arm outstretched that makes us aware we are falling; like whispering in the night. Some books, the best ones, are an encounter with a set of inchoate questions, powerful as someone returning your gaze, someone unknown a moment before, and never unknown again. These are the books we return to - personally, and as a culture; there is a life to these books that cannot be exhausted by criticism or familiarity." Anne Michaels

It reminded me of Proust's description of the best books as being mirrors that reflect us back to ourselves, and the line from Fahrenheit-451, "How many people did you know that refracted your own light back to you?" Well put, Anne Michaels! I'll have to look you up.

- Angel and the outdoors
"He grew away from old associations, and saw something new in life and humanity. Secondarily, he made close acquaintance with phenomena which he had before known but darkly - the seasons in their moods, morning and evening, night and noon, winds in their different tempers, trees, waters and mists, shades and silences, and the voices of inanimate things."

The descriptions of nature in this book are Killer. They make me want to live in the English countryside, or pretty much anywhere outside, and be one with the outdoors.

- Gail Rose - a gentleman farmer
"At times, nevertheless, it did seem unaccountable to her that a decidedly bookish, musical, thinking young man should have chosen deliberately to be a farmer, and not a clergyman, like his fathers and brothers."

I don't know what his motivations were, but my grandfather Gail Rose was a gentleman farmer, working at ARMCO Steel by day and running a roughly 80-acre farm by night. I liked thinking of my grandfather when I read this passage, and him deciding deliberately to be a farmer in addition to a businessman.

- Social reproduction
"Because what's the use of learning that I am one of a long row only - finding out that there is set down in some old book somebody just like me, and to know that I shall only act her part; making me sad, that's all. The best is not to remember that your nature and your past doings have been just like thousands' and thousands', and that your coming life and doings 'll be like thousands' and thousands'."

This is a line from Tess to Angel, on why she doesn't care if she's educated - I found it particularly apt considering that I spent the earlier part of the week at a Race and Equity in Education Seminar, where we reflected at length on the idea of social reproduction. In essence, the argument/belief that we take the place of our parents in society and that culture, power dynamics, SES, don't change in their core because we just complete the cycle over and over and over. I rather like to think that we can launch from the place our parents leave us and build a better, more loving, more equitable society. So Tess, take my advice and get your book-learning!

- Marian, Retty, Izz
Tess is not the only one in love with Boy #2. In fact, he's seen as quite the catch. (As it turns out, not so much, but I guess you can't judge a book by its cover.) Tess's three fellow dairymaids (Marian, Retty, and Izz) are all madly, deeply, inexorably in love with Angel. This leads to some rather tragic turns in all three of their lives, and one moment where Izz almost takes Angel up on an offer to run off to Brazil with him. (I Know! The nerve of him asking Her! Pot Calling Kettle Black, much?)

- On Angel's transition from straightforward Christianity to a sort of Animism
"Every time that he returned hither he was conscious of this divergence, and since he had last shared in the Vicarage life it had grown even more distinctly foreign to his own than usual. Its transcendental aspirations - still unconsciously based on the geocentric view of things, a zenithal paradise, a nadiral hell - were as foreign to his own as if they had been the dreams of people on another planet. Latterly he had seen only Life, felt only the great passionate pulse of existence, unwarped, uncontorted, untrammelled by those creeds which futilely attempt to check what wisdom would be content to regulate attempt to check what wisdom would be content to regulate."

I loved this description. The older I get, the less clear I am on where I stand on formal religion, and the more transfixed I feel by our connection to nature. There's another great line about Angel preferring sermons in stone to sermons on the mount. I'll take my sermons in stone, thank you very much.

- Mr. Collins
"Her refusal, though unexpected, did not permanently daunt Clare. His experience of women was great enough for him to be aware that the negative often meant nothing more than the preface to the affirmative; and it was little enough for him not to know that in the manner of the present negative there lay a great exception to him to the dallyings of coyness."

Angel's opinion that Tess is just being coy when she refuses his proposal at first reminded me of Mr. Collins and his ridiculous assertion that Lizzie is just being coy in saying no. (I never Did return your calls, Mr. Claymore. It's because I. Don't. Like. You.)

- Wooing like Barkis
"In this way Clare persistently wooed her in undertones like that of the purling milk - at the cow's side, at skimmings, at butter-makings, at cheese-makings, among broody poultry, and among farrowing pigs - as no milkmaid was ever wooed before by such a man."

The way Angel woos Tess made me think fondly of Barkis and his wooing of Peggotty with bags of oranges and pieces of ham and random gifts. Wooing can take place anywhere, gentlemen! Let this be a lesson to you!

- Country courtship
"The country custom of unreserved comradeship out of doors during betrothal was the only custom she knew, and to her it had no strangeness; though it seemed oddly anticipative to Clare till he saw how normal a thing she, in common with all the other dairy-folk, regarded it. Thus, during this October month of wonderful afternoons they roved along the meads by creeping paths which followed the brinks of trickling tributary brooks, hopping across by little wooden bridges to the other side, and back again. They were never out of the sound of some purling weir, whose buzz accompanied their own murmuring, while the beams of the sun, almost as horizontal as the mead itself, formed a pollen of radiance over the landscape. They saw tiny blue fogs in the shadows of trees and hedges, all the time that there was bright sunshine elsewhere. The sun was so near the ground, and the sward so flat, that the shadows of Clare and Tess would stretch a quarter of a mile ahead of them, like two long fingers pointed afar to where the green alluvial reaches abutted against the sloping sides of the vale."

I thought it was only fair to include at least one section of the novel where Tess and Angel were happy.

- A happy Tess
"Her affection for him was now the breath and life of Tess's being; it enveloped her as a photosphere, irradiated her into forgetfulness of her past sorrows, keeping back the gloomy spectres that would persist in their attempts to touch her - doubt, fear, moodiness, care, shame."

That sounds nice. I think I'd like to be enveloped as a photosphere, irradiated into forgetfulness.

- My copy - explicit content
You're welcome to borrow my copy of Tess if you haven't read it. It should come with an "Explicit Content" label though, not so much for the text itself, but for my notes. I wrote some less than kind words to Angel during his "Sometimes Mean" phase.

- Angel, on Tess
"In considering what Tess was not, he overlooked what she was, and forgot that the defective can be more than the entire."

How many times do we fail to see that the defective can be more than the entire?

- Tess, to Angel
"How silly I was in my happiness when I thought I could trust you always to love me!"

There was such painful sweetness in this line. Tess is powerful, and goes through arduous difficulties, but what really stole my heart was her tenderness, despite and amidst her sorrows.

- The return
"They stood fixed, their baffled hearts looking out of their eyes with a joylessness pitiful to see. Both seemed to implore something to shelter them from reality."

This moment was heartbreaking. I'd waited the whole book for Angel to see sense and come back to Tess, and when he finally did, it was Too Late! Agony.

- Afterlife
Tess: "Tell me now, Angel, do you think we shall meet again after we are dead? I want to know."
He kissed her to avoid a reply at such a time.
"O, Angel - I fear that means no!" said she, with a suppressed sob. 'And I wanted so to see you again - so much, so much! What - not even you and I, Angel, who love each other so well?"

While I agreed wholeheartedly with many of the philosophies of a more nature-driven then religion-driven sense of the world and the afterlife, it didn't make this moment any less painful.

- Sense of fierce injustice
I was very angry for a large portion of this book. It seems so painfully unfair that Tess's life should be ruined because Slimy Guy took advantage of her. I know that's the way the cookie crumbled back in the late 19th century, but just because I know it doesn't mean I have to like that particular cookie crumbling.

Passages I particularly liked:

• "Far behind the corner of the house - which rose like a geranium bloom against the subdued colours around - stretched the soft azure landscape of The Chase - a truly venerable tract of forest land, one of the few remaining woodlands in England of undoubted primaeval date, wherein Druidical mistletoe was still found on aged oaks, and where enormous yew-trees, not planted by the hand of man, grew as they had grown when they were pollarded for bows."

• "On the morning appointed for her departure Tess was awake before dawn - at the marginal minute of the dark when the grove is still mute, save for one prophetic bird who sings with a clear-voiced conviction that he at least knows the correct time of day, the rest preserving silence as if equally convinced that he is mistaken."

• "It was a fine September evening, just before sunset, when yellow lights struggle with blue shades in hair-like lines, and the atmosphere itself forms a prospect without aid from more solid objects, except the innumerable winged insects that dance in it."

• "Sad October and her sadder self seemed the only two existences haunting that lane."

• "Clare arose in the light of a dawn that was ashy and furtive, as though associated with crime." This might be my favorite line in the whole book.

• on Tess: "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."

• "There had not been such a winter for years. It came on in stealthy and measured glides, like the moves of a chess-player."

• "The air, afflicted to pallor with the hoary multitudes that infested it, twisted and spun them eccentrically, suggesting an achromatic chaos of things."

I'll leave you with this quote, from one of the few moments in the book where Tess is truly happy:

"Her hopes mingled with the sunshine in an ideal photosphere which surrounded her as she bounded along against the soft south wind. She heard a pleasant voice in every breeze, and in every bird's note seemed to lurk a joy."

May your hopes mingle with the sunshine and may you hear a pleasant voice in every breeze. Till next time, and Endearment in the Era of Dystentery!