All the World's a Stage. Of What?

All the world’s a stage. But what sort of stage? I’m just starting to read the British novelist Thomas Hardy. A third of the way into The Return of the Native, I perused the Oxford History of English Literature volume on Eight Modern Writers, by J. I. M. Stewart and came across this passage on Hardy's worldview:

<<He judged that each of us inclines to take an unwarrantably rosy view of his own individual destiny, and that from this comes a general tendency to minimize the extent to which brute circumstance, nature’s neutrality and indifference, negates the sum of human effort, falsifies our calculations, and betrays our hopes.>>

The author also alludes to a common view of Hardy's work that he himself claimed to dislike, that:

<<He saw the power behind the universe as an imbecile jester.>>

(Both quotes, page 28.)

In our time, it can be tempting to take up Hardy’s viewpoint, as we see outrageous absurdities arising anew every hour, and an endless parade of indefensible imbecilities yet defended by the Scribes and Pharisees of the present. And yet, another great writer of Hardy's time, Jane Austen, cautioned us in all her novels about mistaking appearances for realities, as so many do. It may indeed be that a crazy number of our most public events now amount to “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury” and signifying something worth our attention, as it has been in every generation.

When the carnival comes to town in all domains of formerly serious human life, ranging from politics to religion, it should make us reflect on human nature, and on how the modern form of mass communications not only portrays events moment to moment, but actually creates a mummer show beyond any circus that’s previously existed, and yet ornamented with the most bizarre elements of them all.

Hardy once said that he had searched for God for 50 years and that if such a being existed, surely he would have been discovered in all that time. But perhaps there is a certain hiddenness of the ultimate in our world so that we might discover something else that may be even more important for us to know in this life: Ourselves.

For a start on Hardy, click HERE.