Far from the Madding Crowd

by Thomas Hardy

I took for earnest what you insist was jest, and now this that I pray to be jest you say is awful, wretched earnest. Our moods meet at wrong places. I wish your feeling was more like mine, or my feeling more like yours!

Everything is changed, and that by you alone, remember. You were nothing to me once, and I was contented; you are now nothing to me again, and how different the second nothing is from the first! Would to God you had never taken me up, since it was only to throw me down!"

Heavens you must be heartless quite! Had I known what a fearfully bitter sweet this was to be, how I would have avoided you, and never seen you, and been deaf of you. I tell you all this, but what do you care! You don't care."

"Dearest, dearest, I am wavering even now between the two opposites of recklessly renouncing you, and labouring humbly for you again. Forget that you have said No, and let it be as it was!

You overrate my capacity for love. I don't possess half the warmth of nature you believe me to have. An unprotected childhood in a cold world has beaten gentleness out of me."

David motherfucking Hitt

But he stole in in my absence and robbed me.

Okay, but she's not a possession. Yes, she has been manipulated into loving Troy. But ultimately, she chooses what to do with her life. She is not an item to be stolen away

I loved a woman once. I am now ashamed. When I am dead they'll say, Miserable love-sick man that he was.

"Whilst I would have given worlds to touch your hand, you have let a rake come in without right or ceremony and—kiss you! Heaven's mercy—kiss you! …

Oh shitttt and does he have extra insight into Troy's fiendish behavior, thanks to Fanny Robin?

The impending night appeared to concentrate in his eye. He did not hear her at all now.

Such astounding wells of fevered feeling in a still man like Mr. Boldwood were incomprehensible, dreadful. Instead of being a man trained to repression he was—what she had seen him.

Omg girl-- don't tell me. You're into Boldwood now?

blitheness

The village of Weatherbury was quiet as the graveyard in its midst, and the living were lying well-nigh as still as the dead. The church clock struck eleven. The air was so empty of other sounds that the whirr of the clock-work immediately before the strokes was distinct, and so was also the click of the same at their close.

Erie. Clock mentioned!

It was a picture full of misery, but for a while she contemplated it firmly, allowing herself, nevertheless, as girls will, to dwell upon the happy life she would have enjoyed

Nope not/just/ a girl thing, Mr. Hardy. Fuck that

for she had penetrated Troy's nature so far as to estimate his tendencies pretty accurately, but unfortunately loved him no less in thinking that he might soon cease to love her—indeed, considerably more.

Oh no. She logically knows he's a jerk but loves him the better for it. The head vs the heart

Was Bathsheba altogether blind to the obvious fact that the support of a lover's arms is not of a kind best calculated to assist a resolve to renounce him? Or was she sophistically sensible, with a thrill of pleasure, that by adopting this course for getting rid of him she was ensuring a meeting with him, at any rate, once more?

Goddamn

I went to unlock the door and dropped the key, and it fell upon the stone floor and broke into two pieces. Breaking a key is a dreadful bodement.

Never heard of this superstition before

"Twas a bad leg allowed me to read the Pilgrim's Progress, and Mark Clark learnt All-Fours in a whitlow."

Damn... They have to be injured in order to rest

a sneeze, jerking from his pocket his rather large watch, which dangled in front of the young man pendulum-wise.

Are large watches common among the lower classes? I remember Gabriel's being described as very large too (almost more like a clock)

And whilst I was chawing 'em down I walked on and seed a clock with a face as big as a baking trendle—"

Clock mentioned!

"Our poor Parson Thirdly can't get no money to buy such rings," said Matthew Moon, thoughtfully. "And as good a man as ever walked. I don't believe poor Thirdly have a single one, even of humblest tin or copper. Such a great ornament as they'd be to him on a dull afternoon, when he's up in the pulpit lighted by the wax candles! But 'tis impossible, poor man. Ah, to think how unequal things be." "Perhaps he's made of different stuff than to wear 'em," said Gabriel, grimly.

Thinking about Troy being "well-born," perhaps, Gabriel? Troy has got a fancy gold watch, while Gabriel has a large broken watch. But Gabriel doesn't /need/ a watch at all. He can tell time without it, and he doesn't care about the ornamental value

"she'll wish her cake dough if so be she's over intimate with that man."

Omg love this expression. Funny way to thinkm about wanting to go back in time or take something back

Both Bathsheba and the horse seemed weary.

Fuck impulsive Bathsheba for putting poor Dainty through that

Silent and alone, he had remained in moody meditation on woman's ways, deeming as essentials of the whole sex the accidents of the single one of their number he had ever closely beheld.

Classic. Although Mr. Hardy, there are several generalizations about women in this very text -__-

augured

"I don't wish to secure her in any new way."

What a smug fucking jerk

attenuated

Gabriel soon decided too that, since the deed was done, to put the best face upon the matter would be the greatest kindness to her he loved.

Neither Boldwood nor Troy would respond as maturely

or the oak cleared quite away,

Like Shepherd Oak cleared away…

A horseman,

Seeing it phrased this way makes me think of the four hoursemen of the apocalypse

sallow

rooks

with timidity and caution. Thunder was imminent,

Foreboding

Before twelve hours had passed a harvest atmosphere would be a bygone thing.

Praying that this means Boldwood will kill Troy before the day is done

rostrum

viands.

though I have purchased my discharge from Her Most Gracious Majesty's regiment of cavalry the 11th Dragoon Guards,

Bathsheba purchased it, more likely

sonorousness

palimpsest,

that wilful and fascinating mistress whom the faithful man even now felt within him as the embodiment of all that was sweet and bright and hopeless.

Sweet and bright and hopeless :(

In a paddock in the same direction was a herd of heifers, and the forms of these were visible at this moment in the act of galloping about in the wildest and maddest confusion, flinging their heels and tails high into the air, their heads to earth. A poplar in the immediate foreground was like an ink stroke on burnished tin.

Far from the madding crowd? The tree set apart? Oak exiting the party of drunks?

majolica—every

Then came the peal. It hardly was credible that such a heavenly light could be the parent of such a diabolical sound.

Praying that this was actually Boldwood shooting Troy <3

In the meantime one of the grisly forms had alighted upon the point of Gabriel's rod, to run invisibly down it, down the chain, and into the earth. Gabriel was almost blinded, and he could feel Bathsheba's warm arm tremble in his hand—a sensation novel and thrilling enough; but love, life, everything human, seemed small and trifling in such close juxtaposition with an infuriated universe.

Holy shit! Nearly struck by lightning to save this woman's harvest

he saw that the tree was sliced down the whole length of its tall, straight stem, a huge riband of bark being apparently flung off. The other portion remained erect, and revealed the bared surface as a strip of white down the front. The lightning had struck the tree.

impetuosity.

the contradictoriness of that feminine heart which had caused her to speak more warmly to him to-night than she ever had done whilst unmarried and free to speak as warmly as she chose.

Oak suddenly remembered that eight months before this time he had been fighting against fire in the same spot as desperately as he was fighting against water now—and for a futile love of the same woman.

Is love ever futile?

all judgment from a fellow's experience went for nothing.

What experience do you have, Troy?? Loser

her voice was painfully lowered from the fulness and vivacity of the previous summer—"that

Now, there 'tis again—turn on the waterworks; that's just like you."

Not the gaslighting