Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 02/26/10

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Friday, February 26, 2010

Poem of the Day: Thomas Hardy

The Darkling Thrush

I leant upon a coppice gate
     When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
     The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
     Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
     Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be
     The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
     The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
     Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
     Seemed fervorless as I.

At once a voice arose among
     The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
     Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
     In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
     Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
     Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
     Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
     His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
     And I was unaware.

--Thomas Hardy

In general, I prefer Hardy the poet to Hardy the novelist. In his fiction, he's so eager to prove that the Universe has it in for Humankind that he stacks the deck. Thus, Tess goes to her doom because of a letter that slips under the carpet when it's slid under the door. But at least in "The Darkling Thrush" there's some cold comfort: a bird's song arousing Hope.

Of course, old Hardy knows that things are going to remain "desolate," "weakening" and "fervorless." The poem, famously, was published in the Times of London on January 1, 1901, the first day of a new century, and was originally given the perhaps more Hardyesque title "By the Century's Deathbed." Given that the century a-borning would see two World Wars and all manner of atrocity besides, that hopeful thrush turned out to be a birdbrain.