Another snowfall – Musings on Thomas Hardy – Another anti-vaxxer succumbs – Potential progress in treatment of long COVID – Ominous signs for the upcoming elections – Evening statistics
We had another snowstorm today, the third one of the season. It was severe further to the north, but it was light here, with well under an inch of snow. The snowfall was over before dawn and the roads were already clear when I arose in the morning. It was not necessary to plow them; the pre-treatment that the roads received earlier this week was sufficient to melt all of the snowfall upon contact.
The hike that I was supposed to lead today was canceled because everyone dropped out, fearing that driving on the roads would be too uncertain. It was too fine a day to stay indoors all the time, however, so I went to hike the circuit around Lake Accotink. What is merely a pleasant walk in other seasons was enchanting today, the reflection of the sunlight from thin cover of white snow on the bushes and vines imparting a bright pearly radiance to the air.
During some of the remainder of my enforced leisure I finished re-reading Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders, a novel that is infinitely superior to the much-vaunted Jude the Obscure in every respect, not least because we are not asked to sympathize with characters so utterly repellent as Sue Bridehead.
It is difficult to make up one’s mind about Hardy. His writing contains excellences that are uniquely his own and one would be sorry to forego them. His method of making landscapes as memorable as other novelists’ characterizations has never been surpassed. It is a commonplace that Egdon Heath in The Return of the Native is practically a character in its own right, but the descriptions of the forest country in which The Woodlanders is set are equally remarkable. To take a sentence almost at random:
“A lingering wind brought to her ear the creaking sound of two over-crowded branches in the neighboring wood which were rubbing each other into wounds, and other vocalized sorrows of the trees, together with the screech of owls, and the fluttering tumble of some awkward wood-pigeon ill-balanced on its roosting-bough.”
Is there any other writer who can talk so authoritatively about trees having sorrows? In most novels that use wooded settings at all, the trees are merely part of a backdrop; in Hardy’s novels we are continually reminded that they are as alive as we are.
Then, too, Hardy can be very funny. True, he doesn’t often choose to be, but when he does he can craft dialog that would not be out of place in a vaudeville act.
“’And I knowed a woman, and the husband o’ her went away for four-and-twenty year,’ said the bark-ripper. ‘And one night he came home when she was sitting by the fire, and thereupon he sat down himself on the other side of the chimney-corner. “Well,” says she, “have ye got any news?” “Don’t know as I have,” says he; “have you?” “No,” says she, “except that my daughter by my second husband was married last month, which was a year after I was made a widow by him.” “Oh! Anything else?” he says. “No”’ says she. And there they sat, one on each side of that chimney-corner, and were found by their neighbors sound asleep in their chairs, not having known what to talk about at all.’”
One is very often brought up, however, by a sense of being manipulated either to approve of certain characters or to condemn others when readers’ estimates of them clearly differ from these characters’ author.
We get a hint of this in The Mayor of Casterbridge, in the passage describing the aftermath of Lucetta’s death from a premature miscarriage:
“Time, ‘in his own grey style,’ taught Farfrae how to estimate his experience of Lucetta – all that it was, and all that it was not. There are men whose hearts insist upon a dogged fidelity to some image or cause thrown by chance into their keeping, long after their judgment has pronounced it no rarity – even the reverse, indeed, and without them the band of the worthy is incomplete. But Farfrae was not of those. It was inevitable that the insight, briskness, and rapidity of his nature should take him out of the dead blank which his loss threw about him. He could not but perceive that by the death of Lucetta he had exchanged a looming misery for a simple sorrow. After that revelation of her history, which must have come sooner or later in any circumstances, it was hard to believe that life with her would have been productive of further happiness.”
What dreadful crime has Mrs. Donald Farfrae committed to make her widower believe that by losing her only a few months after his marriage he has “exchanged a looming misery for a simple sorrow”? Murder? Arson? Destroying a village’s water supply? No – none of these. Lucetta’s offence is that she once conducted an illicit affair before her marriage. The affair ended well before she first met Farfrae. She has been devoted to Farfrae from the day of her marriage onwards and indeed has idolized him completely. There is not a hint that she was tempted to commit adultery with her former lover or even that she was remotely so inclined. But it makes no difference. She was not a virgin when she married Farfrae; and that, according to Farfrae and apparently according to Hardy as well, puts her beyond the pale.
Of course Angel Clare from Tess of the d’Urbervilles is the most famous offender of this type. After pursuing Tess with a passionate courtship that lasts for months, he virtually bundles her out of the house within a week after their marriage as a result of her confession that she had had intercourse with another man – some four years before her marriage to Clare took place, and as a rape victim to boot. Hardy seems uneasily aware that such an attitude would seem overly severe even to late Victorians:
“Some might risk the odd paradox that with more animalism he would have been the nobler man. We do not say it. Yet Clare’s love was doubtless ethereal to a fault, imaginative to impracticability. With these natures, corporal presence is something less appealing than corporal absence; the latter creating an ideal presence that conveniently drops the defects of the real.”
Paradoxical or not, I for one have no hesitation in saying that Clare’s conduct is as ignoble as can possibly be conceived. And it is not a question of “animalism”: common humanity would dictate that a victim of rape receive support and consolation from all of her associates, let alone from the man who has recently become her husband.
However, Angel Clare at least comes to realize that he has been in the wrong and eventually returns to Tess to ask forgiveness from her: too late of course to be of any use. Still, he deserves credit for trying. Far worse is Sue Bridehead, who mistreats her husband from beginning to end. What a mauling Richard Phillotson gets from his wife and Jude between them!
Discussing the sin of Pride in Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis remarks: “power is what Pride really enjoys: there is nothing makes a man feel so superior to others as being able to move them about like toy soldiers. What makes a pretty girl spread misery wherever she goes by collecting admirers? Certainly not her sexual instinct: that kind of girl is quite often sexually frigid. It is Pride.”
And that describes Sue Bridehead to perfection. She is sexually frigid – Hardy is quite explicit on that point – but she openly enjoys men’s attention and goes out of her way to procure it. She strings along both Jude and Phillotson, but when she makes the discovery that Jude has been previously married she immediately becomes engaged to Phillotson without having the smallest amount of affection for him. Eventually she finds his embraces so distasteful that she persuades him to divorce her and goes to live with Jude instead. She claims that she intends to marry Jude sooner or later but continually puts off the ceremony for no viable reason, even after bearing two of his children – rather an extreme level of reluctance to commitment. Later still, when she encounters tragedy and loses her children, she succumbs to religious mania and under its influence persuades Phillotson to take her back as his wife again. Regrettably, Phillotson does not respond to this arrangement as I was yearning for him to do – something along the lines of “Sorry, no can do, I’ve moved on to other things. So long, farewell, parting is such sweet sorrow, but not from you.” Alas, Phillotson takes her on again, even though she specifies that there is to be no sex between them and even though she persists in meeting with Jude in secret after her remarriage. Later still, she does yet another volte face and decides that it is her duty to allow Phillotson into the marriage bed, but she does so in a manner that displays such unmistakable aversion to his physical touch that it is unlikely that any bouts of licit intercourse between this pair in future will provide much satisfaction to either of them.
I am simply astounded when critics describe this neurotic, pretentious, manipulative, egocentric, vacillating, emotionally unstable woman as an example of the so-called “New Woman” of the late decades of the 19th century who was making energetic and successful efforts to obtain better education and a greater variety of employment opportunities. She certainly is nothing like Mary Barfoot and Rhoda Nunn in George Gissing’s The Odd Women: strong, capable, intelligent, vigorous women who have definite objectives in life and who mold their own destinies without looking for support from anyone else.
To be fair, Sue Bridehead is a character in a Thomas Hardy novel; and in Hardy’s universe, no one, man or woman, is capable of molding his or her own destiny. Sooner or later circumstances will intervene to thwart his or her goals; Hardy always sees to that. It is very strange that the heroines of the novels of Jane Austen, whose circumstances are considerably more restricted than those of any of Hardy’s heroines, give the impression of being much more in control of their lives.
And so it is that when reading Thomas Hardy one must always be prepared for a jarring note of this sort to interfere with appreciating so much that is admirable in his work. He writes much that is insightful, much that is perceptive, much that is moving, much that is vivid, much that is of historical interest; but sooner or later one comes across praise for conduct or attitudes that are far from commendable, severe censure for what are minor peccadillos at the worst, and twists of fate that are obviously contrived to ensure that the characters will be as unhappy as possible. For those who are not yet acquainted with Hardy and who wish to sample his work, one might do worse than to begin with The Woodlanders, in which these characteristic flaws are less prominent than in other works and in which one can luxuriate in the descriptions of the forest and of the activities associated with the orchard and timber industries in such a region.
From these literary excursuses I move on to current developments:
Robert LaMay, a state trooper in the state of Washington, was fired in October for failing to comply with Governor Jay Inslee’s mandate for all state employees to get vaccinated. He left a departing message In the form of a youtube video that went viral, in which he said: “After 22 years of serving the citizens of the state of Washington, I’m being asked to leave because I am dirty. This is the last time you’ll hear me in a state patrol car. And Jay Inslee can kiss my ass.” For some unknown reason, Governor Inslee failed to avail himself of this unique opportunity and now it is unobtainable; three months afterwards, LaMay contracted the virus and died from it.
Some progress has been made in isolating factors that determine who is susceptible to long COVID. Four factors have been identified: 1) autoantibodies, antibodies that mistakenly attack healthy parts of the body. Autoantibodies are associated with autoimmune diseases, such as lupus, but they may be present in persons who are not afflicted with such diseases as well; 2) the reactivation of a different virus called Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV), which is extremely common, infecting up to 90% of people at some point, and often causing only mild symptoms. If reactivated as a result of contracting COVID, it may increase the possibility of lingering COVID symptoms as well; 3) the degree to which the COVID virus is present in the blood, a factor that is known as the “viral load”; 4) the presence of Type 2 diabetes. The findings are tentative, but they may eventually point the way for more effective measures of treating persistent COVID symptoms.
Poor old Biden keeps blundering along and is steadily alienating the mainstream voters in the process. Isaiah Carter, a blue-collar worker who has consistently voted Democratic, is a case in point. He recently gave an interview with Fox News in which he registered disgust with the manner in which Biden has made concessions to the extreme so-called Progressive wing of the party. In particular, he cites the manner in which the party promotes critical race theory. He himself is African-American, but, in his words, “I don’t like the idea of kids – Black kids, White kids, whatever – separated by race and then made to feel like one group is oppressed and the other group is not.” He also criticized the withdrawal from Afghanistan – not the withdrawal in itself but the inept way in which it was handled – and the promotion of the progressives’ gender identify agenda, which he claims has injured women’s rights and has negatively affected young children who are being subjected to gender ideology discussions in schools across the country. With all of these positions I myself concur, and so I suspect do the majority of American voters. Carter went on to say:
“Democrats, I need you to listen to me carefully. The fact that I, a blue-collar Democratic worker, am speaking to Fox News, should scare you. The fact that they’re willing to talk to me and MSNBC and CNN are not, that is a problem. That should tell you all how far we’ve fallen away from the common man.”
It does scare me. At this rate the Democrats will almost certainly lose the upcoming elections this year. And if the Republicans regain control of the Senate and the House, that looming baneful influence of Donald Trump will return – not that it has ever gone away completely, but it will be in a position of power again. It all goes back to what my friend JN – also a blue-collar lifetime Democrat – has remarked to me some months ago: there is no centrist party left.
Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 373,006,035; # of deaths worldwide: 5,676,020; # of cases U.S.: 75,481,122; # of deaths; U.S.: 906,861.