My Mom sends me Jude the Obscure, has me go down to Kramerbooks on Dupont to pick it up.  Guy with the cool haircut, when I explain, 'My mom has bought me a copy of Jude...' says calmly, without any hint of 'pain in the ass,' 'if a book is on hold it's over at the other register,' 'okay, thanks a lot.'  He must recognize me.  I try to tip the other guy with the two dollar bill that he himself gave me when I came in to break a five so I could tip a street musician.  "You never know when you may need it," he tells me.  "Well, it must be my lucky dollar because I got it here."  I pay for the other book, Caesar's Gallic Wars, also a Penguin Classic, like the Hardy.  It's a book I've never read.  Shame on me for not taking 19th Century Novels with Prof. G. Armour Craig...

Literature is the only thing that saves us.  I think that's going on behind the lines of Larkin somehow, indirectly, "nothing to love/ or link with," about his bachelor life.  Like other literary chaps he hasn't been uncomplicated enough to be straight about showing the girl he loves how he loves her and how he's going to take care of everything.  Does the writer have, if you will, a feminine side, a side similarly in touch with nature, less force of the Ego's illusions, too much so that he does not properly show more than appreciation?  Too busy being, not enough 'wanting to be with her, with her being her, not you so much, because you've got to take care of her, so that she can be her.'  Don't f up like Ted Hughes did, leaving her alone, the winter cold, he having been with another woman, caught at it.

There is an event up at Amherst coming, a celebration of 374 years of teaching English at the college.  It would be good to go, just to be part of that.  At least one should contribute a remembrance, a note, maybe some form of crude literary piece about the education one received, looking back on it.

Jude, from reading only the first few chapters, and the quick synopsis from Wikipedia, whom we first encounter as a boy, is looking toward the Oxford/Cambridge type town of Christminster, where one day he will be employed as a stone mason.  He dreams of a university education, of donning the gown. Things befall him.  The putting at arm's length of society and poverty itself 'threaten to ruin him,' as the book's back cover explains.  But he is a reverent kid, with his eyes of a poet, and, anticipating a later poem of Hardy's feeds extra grain to the birds, and gets in serious trouble for it with the old kingpin farmer.

I guess it's easy enough to identify, for most of us, taking a look at our employment situations, and perhaps Larkin felt the same about being a librarian, as I might about serving French wine, not far away from simple work in stone, which, one supposes, is less than gentlemanly work, though it still asks of one to be, in another sense of the term, a gentle man.  As Christ is a gentle man.

And this is the rub.  "The letter killeth."  Not letter in the literary sense, but in the sense of strict enforcement of the letter of the Law, that embodiment of the society's great Ego.  The letter kills the imagination, the creativity, the participation, the great equality, the great decency.

My take on it, is that the literary life somehow makes up for sins, for your bunglings with the girl who came along then, for your bunglings now of being unable to do more than barely provide for your own belly.  And, I suppose, for those well-educated, given a great start at having a decent life, this weighs heavy, that you've let it down in some ways, maybe were just too shy...

But if you try, or tried, at least if you tried, there is something inherently redeeming in your own humble literary efforts, even if they aren't up to the professional stuff of the day with its clever dialog and psychological character' through-lines, with the tension of conflict keeping the eye.  To which I secretly say, 'hasn't anyone ever looked at a painting?'  The eye enjoys a painting, and makes all the meaning it needs to, and simply enjoys the view.  Sure, the painting must have its own craft, but, a little God's light on a tree in a lonely forest, a cabin, a steam, boom, like the guy with the 'fro on late PBS, you got me.

Think of poor Jude.  His heart's in the right place.  And put aside, by the way, the dreary ending; don't be negative about emulating him.

Or is that Jesus speaking, out of an ideal world, in a world where one does have to follow the strict letter of the law, in academia, in the literary world, in law, business, medicine, well, everything...

I like the literary life of barbershops, maybe of bars, if bars weren't immediately associated with work.


Walking the dog, there are a couple of choices.  My brother:  take her down to that new park by the river.  My own instinct:  take her to the woods, away from built up stuff and pavement, to fields, to forest, to dirt paths uneven, leading along the stream down to the creek.

The NY Times Travel, Footsteps, takes us to Pennsylvania, the Brandywine Valley, "In Pennsylvania, Exploring Wyeth's World," by Geraldine Fabrikant, published May 24, 2013.  Within is interesting commentary about how Andrew Wyeth felt he travelled quite well enough in familiar surroundings, one local hill being a thousand others.  He was very secretive about where he was going when he headed out of the house to work.  It seems to make a lot of sense, the ecology of an artist.