“Ankle deep, he waded through the bluebells. His spirit rose and exalted… as he breathed in the sun-drenched air. The glorious day was in its last decline. Long shadows lay on the sward… and from above the leaves dripped their shimmering drops of gold-green light. Moths and butterflies swarmed in merry hosts… flittering here, glimmering there. But, hush. Could that be a deer?”
When we were searching for “Tess of d’Urbervilles” in the library memories rushed in, almost overwhelming me. Memories of school days when I would look at a bookshelf and see different worlds, when Hercule Poirot and Dirk Pitt and Sherlock Holmes loomed larger than life, when the reality of life was less real than those in books, when my sadness and happiness and mood changes did not depend on what happened in the life I was living but in the lives of characters that I was closely following, when even though the only place I had been to, other than Bangalore, that too occasionally, was Pathanamthitta in Kerala, I felt as thought I’d really travelled allover the world - London, New York, Paris, Venice, Rome, you name it .. and not only to the 21st century versions of foreign lands but also in the 20, and 19th and 18th and 17th and even backwards into the past even though I seemed to linger more in the 17th and18th century country side England.
I haven’t seen a movie that showed this more clearly than Howards End. The passage at the beginning of this post is from the movie when Leonard Bast gets lost completely in what he is reading.
Well, why “Tess ” ? Why were we searching for Tess ? A was channel surfing and accidentally halted at a channel which was airing “Tess of d’Urbevilles - Part 1”. Sometimes I think my zeal to tell a story runs ahead of me and I tell the important points, mainly glorifying the best aspects beyond what they are. I’ve pumped so much of awe and mystery around my favourite novels, mostly “Kane and Abel”, “The Godfather”, “The Bourne Identity”, “Atlas Shrugged” .. , that most of my friends did read them eventually. Sometimes I feel if you praise something so much, the person who is listening to you almost feels obliged to try that at least to make you happy. But to be fair to her, she saw the movie for sometime and actually liked it. Luckily the channel did not air part 2 and I wasn’t ready to tell her the ending. Only mentioned that it was a tragedy. For long, I’ve been wanting her to read “The Return of the Native” (I think I’ve told her the story of the novel twice already) and other novels of Hardy. Afterall, he was my fav author at one time. For now she’s said she has to read Tess. Ah ! so be it.
Header Image - “The birthplace of Thomas Hardy at Bockhampton in Dorset” by Anguskirk via Flickr.