good deal too strange to
be believed, nothing is too
strange to have happened
Thomas Hardy was one of those writers who was able to produce and publish many long novels and over 900 poems but at the same time keep a commonplace book of random thoughts and ideas as they came to him.
Mr. Hardy left several volumes of his commonplace notebooks after his death and four of them were compiled and published as The personal notebooks of Thomas Hardy : with an appendix including the unpublished passages in the original typescripts of the Life of Thomas Hardy (New York : Columbia University Press. 1979).
In the introduction, the editor, a Richard H. Taylor states, “In these notebooks Hardy is not addressing himself to his public or his friends or posterity, but to his own immediate purposes. The notes they contain are varied and there is much to delight the reader responsive to the nuances of Hardy’s imagination.”
Now here is my point.
Mr. Hardy wrote in his notebook on Feb 12, 1871, “Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.“
There is a footnote to this entry that states, “A principle very evident in Hardy’s prose fiction.”
And the footnote goes on to quote Mr. Hardy saying, “The real, if unavowed, purpose of fiction is to give pleasure by gratifying the love of the uncommon in human experience, mental or corporeal.“
When Mr. Hardy wrote down Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened, he apparently was thinking of its application to fiction and telling a good story.
I put it to you that when you read, Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened, all you have to is consider the news today, OH BOY.
The British Army has just won the war!
Climate.
Politics.
My life.
TOO STRANGE!
Well that was Mr. Hardy thinking back in 1871.
Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.
After all this is the feller who when he died, was cremated and his ashes were buried in Westminster Abby.
But, his heart was removed and buried in Stinsford, West Dorset District, Dorset, England.
Well most of it.
According to one account, “His heart was buried at Stinsford churchyard in Dorset, and when his corpse was being prepared for this operation the doctor was called away urgently, just after he had removed the heart and left it in a dish beside the body. When he returned, he found his cat had eaten part of it. So the cat was killed, too, and buried alongside the remains of the heart in the ornate container prepared for it.”
Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.
No Haiku For You 