Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D’Urbervilles screened on ABC1 TV, Sunday 8:30, 11 and 18 April 2010 could be said to provide an interesting perspective on manners. I leave this piece written in two parts after watching the two episodes with readers here at The Forum.-Ron in Tasmania.

Part 1:

I first came across Thomas Hardy in grades 11 and 12 in Burlington Ontario. His novels The Mayor of Casterbridge and Tess of the D’Urbervilles were the novels we studied in those last two years at Burlington Central High School. I was a good student, near the top of my class, but I remember finding Hardy: heavy, cumbersome, difficult reading, although nowhere near as difficult as the Shakespeare play we also studied each year. I did not come across Hardy again until some thirty years later in the early 1990s when I taught matriculation English at a technical and further education college in Perth Western Australia. Again, it was Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

And so it was, when I saw this novel brought to life by some of Britain’s best young acting talent, filmed in the U.K. in 2008 and shown on ABC11 on the last two Sunday evenings, I could not help but reflect and so wrote this prose-poem. Greek humanism in its optimistic and pessimistic, cynical and skeptical, forms and not Abrahamic revelation, in the end, stands out in Hardy. It is a road I would have gone down myself had I not discovered a new Flame-Voice and Its extreme solutions, a new prophet placed in Israel’s oven where the heat consumes everything but compassion.2-Ron Price with thanks to 1 ABC1 TV, Sunday 8:30, 11 and 18 April 2010 and 2Roger White, Occasions of Grace, George Ronald, Oxford, 1992, p.102 and p.97.

How could one forget your words:
happiness is but one occasional....
episode in a general drama of pain!

Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D’Urbervilles screened on ABC1 TV, Sunday 8:30, 11 and 18 April 2010 could be said to provide an interesting perspective on manners. I leave this piece written in two parts after watching the two episodes with readers here at The Forum.-Ron in Tasmania.

Part 2:

No wonder I found your ponderous
descriptions tested my patience back
at the age of 16 when the oils of youth
were bulging out seeking to grease and
light my life beyond that world of sport,
school, girls and endlessly familiar stuff
that filled my life and days way-far-then.

Your reputation for extreme pessimism,
your pessimistic pantheism, precedence
of feeling over thought.....religious and
metaphysical uncertainties...a nostalgia
for the things of everyday, a longing for
lost faith, seeing change as superficial in
your world—its doomed stronghold of
ancient ways of life, morbid in a way, but
also sublimely compassionate: your many-
sided personality, Thomas, very attractive.

Your sense of dignity, of awe and a power
of endurance in a timeless universe: what a
grand and strange place which we glimpse
only momentarily through the accidents and
coincidences, the tragic fate and a series of
kicks on the long road, long haul to disaster:
no light at the end of your tunnel, eh, Thomas?

Ron Price
16 April 2010