Across the pond

Sitting in the rain in the car park at Tesco in Axminster at midday gazing out at a scene of total gloom. Not a refreshing April shower but an unrelenting downpour that has been going on all morning. And a sky which is promising that it will go on all afternoon. In front of me tanned young men, coatless and hatless, are running from their cars to the shelter of the store. Little old ladies are struggling to control their trolleys and their umberellas as they hurry out with their groceries. And one of the few carless shoppers, a middle-aged Chinese woman,  sitting on the seat beside, hoping against hope, that the rain would stop. After a wait of ten minutes or so, she shrugged her shoulders, took up her trolley, and walked off to the ramp that leads into the town. Not only did she not have a car, she did not have an umbrella. So she will got seriously wet.

This is the sort of weather which drives those prone to SAD (seasonal affective depression) to despair. And it plunged me into the glooms when I was a boy whenever it happened during the cricket season. Depression, as anyone who has suffered from it will tell you, is different from ordinary sadness. When it hits it leaves you with no energy to do anything, because the way you feel it seems like anything you do is not going to make any difference.

Back here in my bungalow the wind is up and rain is spattering the window panes. Portland Bill is hidden by the murk but I can see the beach, which is deserted, but the light brown sand relieves  the greyness. And the dark green sea is ligthtened by row upon row of frothy white horses.

Quite apart from the weather I have another reason to sink into depression. The chances are that most of the potential readers who happen upon this post via Google will not read it, because of the warning message that Google has put up, warning them that reading my blog may harm their computer. I have as yet had no useful reply to the emails I dashed off a couple of days ago asking for help and guidance as to how to get this warning removed, now that Spy Doctor has pronounced my computer free of even low risk dodgy software. And I realise it may take several days or weeks to get clearance. Or worse that I might not ever be able to move the mighty Google Goliath with my puny catapult.

But as of now I have not sunk into depression. My energy took me to the keyboard as soon as I returned from Axminster. To write, amoungst other things, about the paradox. One of the reasons I have chosen to live in Dorset, is that it does have areas like Egdon Heath, desolate exposed heathland that even today can be life-threatening if you get lost in the mist and have inadequate clothing. I knew that from the novels of Thomas Hardy, long before I had visited Dorset.

Though Hardy’s novels are depressing, in that many of his heroes and heroines come to a sorry end, because of fatal flaws in their own personalities, or because of  the forces of nature or because of the hostile behaviiour of other human beings, they did not depress me. On the contrary they helped me deal with my own teenage depression. I was inspired, for instance, by the story of that pregant Hardy heroine who has to get herself to hospital across Egdon heath on the bleakest of bleak days. Alone. She makes it by aiming for the next milestone, dragging herself along, clinging to it, while she rests, before setting off for the milestone ahead.

I still think of her now, when I am climbing a steep hill towards the end of the day, tired and short of breath. Like her, I target a place I can see ahead, where I can sit down and rest, to recharge my batteries before I press on towards the next milestone.

I thought of her when last Thursday night when I was listening to Claire Tomalin talking in Sturminster Newton about her biography, Thomas Hardy, The Time-Torn Man, now available in paper-back as well as hard-back. One of the main points of her talk, and her book, is that although Hardy lived long enough to win national and international acclaim, he died a disappointed man. He lived to write poetry. He wrote his novels to earn sufficient money to enable him to go on writing poetry. He wrote, some excellent poems, but even today he is has not achieved the five-star rating he longed for.

This mattered to Hardy. More than it should have done. Because he did not compromise his poet’s heart, when writing his novels. He was not attempting to write best-sellers, although several of the novels he wrote, became best-sellers. He had quite a battle with publishers to get his first great novel, The Return of the Native, published. Tomlin writes:

The greatness of The Return of the Native is that it as much the work of Hardy the poet as Hardy the novelist. All his novels have elements of poetry, but this is the first in which, although he had made his concepts into fiction, essentially he is setting down a poetic dream.

But not a Hollywood dream with a happy ending. As Tomlin notes:

Dreams, or nightmares. His tale ends in tragedy for most, three of the principal figures caught up in flight and disaster ending in death……….

Hardy wrote the Return of the Native in 1878, during the two years he lived in the house at Sturnminster Newton, pictured at the top of this blog, which we visited before the talk. Hardy did not much like the house, which is you can see is boring villa. But he loved the view over the Dorset countryside and down the River Stour towards the elegant bridge which leads into the centre of the town.

The picture below is of Claire Tomlin talking to three teenage girls, (who I did not get in the picture because I zoomed the phone too much to get a close up of the author). Yes, the teenagers told her, they were doing Hardy for A-levels.

But if it was a duty visit, they were clearly enjoying it. And their presence cheered me up. The book is not dead. These 2008 teenagers were not spending the evening drinking themselves into a stupor in the high street, or losing their money in New Labour’s casinos, or watching soap operas on one of the hundreds of channels showing them.

This cheered me up somewhat. Because I am writing this on the day all the media are full of stories about the Austrian man, who fathered children through incest with his own daughter, and kept her and them locked up in a cellar for more than twenty years. And all that time he was going out to do the shopping and chatting to neighbours, who, apparently, thought he was an ordinary human being, not the ogre he was. And all of it happening in a small town which is about the same size as Sturminster Newton, and where the houses are cheek by jowl.

Hardy, who wrote uncompromisingly about flawed human beings, who committed some atrocities against their nearest and dearest. But nothing in Hardy’s imaginings is anythting near to the inhuman behaviour of Jozef Fritzel.

As I wrote this paragraph I realised that the rain had stopped. The sun is now shining. I can just see the outline of Portland Bill through the mist. And there are three human figures on the beach. At least they look like human beings, but how can I be sure they are not inhuman beings taking a rest from abusing their nearest and dearest.