Lamps Between Centuries

I had only just finished studying Ecclesiastes when I began my second reading of Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd.

Bathsheba’s vanity is among the first things Gabriel Oak notices about her, and having just come from Vanity of vanities; all is vanity, the first faint echo of Ecclesiastes was already there.

And then, just twenty-nine pages into Hardy, Bathsheba refuses Oak’s proposal…

“No - no - I cannot. Don’t press me any more - don’t. I don’t love you - so ‘twould be ridiculous!” she said, with a laugh.

How incredibly heartbreaking. Only moments before, this hopeful young man had been imagining marriage, loyal companionship, a flourishing farm, tiny feet and handprints touching every piece of hard floor and furniture, a piano for Bathsheba, for farmer’s wives are getting to have pianos now, and Gabriel joining her at evening time with his flute. Honestly, Gabriel has assembled an entire dream board, made all the more devastating by Bathsheba being spectacularly uninterested in auditioning for her part. Oh how very sad!  A whole future stretching before him, only to be taken to the threshing floor.

The beautiful and rebellious woman had refused him over and over. And since “no man likes to see his emotions the sport of a merry-go-round of skittishness…” Hardy gives Gabriel no choice but to give in and reply to his fallen love: “Very well,” firmly, with the bearing of one who was going to give his days and nights to Ecclesiastes for ever. “Then I’ll ask you no more.”

Ahhhhh!! Ecclesiastes. Of course.

For anyone less recently acquainted with Ecclesiastes, Hardy’s choice deserves a wicked wink of a moment. The book is preoccupied with the brevity of life, the weariness of labor, the futility of striving, the failure of pleasure to satisfy, and the uncomfortable realization that nearly everything we spend our lives reaching for eventually slips through our hands. Its great recurring word is hevel, often rendered vanity, but carrying the sense of vapor or breath, something visible for but a moment and impossible to hold, as fleeting as a moonbeam in one’s hand.

So where else does one send a newly rejected lover but into the biblical contemplation of how very little in this life turns out as one hoped?

For as the Preacher taught:

“Better is the end of a thing than the beginning thereof: and the patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit.” (Ecclesiastes 7:8)

It is wonderfully funny.

And having only just studied the book, I could finally appreciate the source of Hardy’s wit.

There is something oh-so contrary in his choice. Oak has reached toward an imagined future. Hardy answers him with a book about the elusiveness of nearly everything human hands try to hold.

Poor sap, love has disappointed you? Very well. Off to Ecclesiastes. Where the Preacher offers this consolation:

“Sorrow is better than laughter: for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better.” (Ecclesiastes 7:3)

At least, for now.

And somehow, on my first pass, these lines had slipped right past me.

That may be the part I love most.

How beautiful it is to meet an ancient text again inside another story, Ecclesiastes carried through centuries, imprinted into Hardy, and somehow arriving on the page just as I had finally come to know it.

And already understanding that the Gospel story itself is woven through Far from the Madding Crowd, perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised. Scripture is never very far beneath the surface of Hardy’s world. Its names, images, symbols, rhythms, stories, and paradoxes move through the novel, sometimes announced and sometimes barely audible.

But they require something of the reader, too.

You cannot fully hear what one book is saying until you know the other books it is speaking to.

Not long ago I thought that reading deeply meant paying closer attention to the book in front of me. I am humbly being taught that it actually means bringing other books with me.  And I cannot bring other books with me if I am not in them.  Or worse, if I think only of myself while I am in them.

An allusion becomes more than an allusion when you know what lies behind it. A single word can carry an entire inheritance. Humor written 150 years ago can suddenly become funny again. A sentence you have encountered before can become an entirely different one once you recognize the older voice sounding beneath it.

There is something almost haunting about carrying words written thousands of years ago into a novel written 150 years ago, only to discover them already there, one story casting light upon another, little lamps left burning between the centuries.

Nothing on the page had changed since my first reading.

Hardy had already tucked Ecclesiastes into Oak’s heartbreak. The old voice had been there all along, moving beneath his own.

I simply didn’t know enough yet to recognize it.

And that is what I am beginning to love about learning to read literature: the discovery that books do not exist alone. They answer, borrow, blush at, remember, invert, touch, and illuminate one another across languages and centuries.

How remarkable to discover a conversation carried through the ages, inviting anyone to draw near and listen in.

The books have been forever whispering to one another since their infancy. I simply have to learn how to read well enough to overhear them.

Fondly,

Stephanie