"Poor wounded name!..."

This afternoon on the way to the "library," I picked up the first book I saw, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and read the first chapter. All my life I have put off reading this book. I've read The Mayor of Casterbridge and Jude the Obscure, and I once saw a beautiful movie based on Far From the Madding Crowd. I should have read Tess first, but for a while I was saving it for a future treat, and then after reading Jude, I decided I had had all the Thomas Hardy I could take.

Now I am so captivated by Tess, the book, that I can't do anything industrious. The next day or so will be spent among those pages. A map in the front of the old book shows me that "Wessex," the setting, is southwest in England, almost Cornwall, an area with which I made myself as well acquainted as possible in my short time there, in the year 1997. This cures my impression that "Wessex" was somewhere north near Scotland or Hadrian's Wall. I've always tended towards ignorance in geography. But I loved Bristol and the Channel, and Bath, Lynton, Tintagel, Barnstable. Stonehenge and Salisbury. Well, I didn't love Stonehenge, but I liked the old crooked-spired cathedral so much that I re-read Sarum.

If my sentences are somewhat scatterbrained, it's because I can't wait to get back to the book.