Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Tragedy Unavoidable?

(spoilers)

Just finished reading Tess of the d'Urbervilles, the first Thomas Hardy I've ever read, will not be the last for sure. I wonder what made me to neglect this literature classic for so long. I watched movie "Tess" when I was a teenager, it somehow didn't strike me as hard as "Jane Eyre" or some other films adapted from literature masterpieces. Recently, for some obscure reasons I picked up the original book, found myself immediately drawn into the story.

There's not much I could say about this book that is not been already said by others. Tess - an astonishingly beautiful peasant girl, a "fine creature", yet unbelievably selfless even downtrodden, tries relentlessly to make a better life for her family and herself, ends up being hanged. Not even that, none of the miserable happenings befall her is her fault, but she endures them all nonetheless. The tragedy is simply beyond anyone can bare. Her ultimate sacrifice seems avoidable, as I myself already "designed" a dozen of different endings, however, I have to admit, what she does at the end - murdering Alec d'Urbervilles is completely understandable under the context. Basically, Thomas Hardy just created a flawless tragedy, let his readers continue to moan for her heroine for centuries.

Science And Industry - Problems Or Solution?

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Those who think science and industry are culprits for humans' misery in modern time just because of pollution and deadly weapons, forgot how miserably humans lived prior to industrial revolution, forgot that it was due to science and industry we could afford today's overloaded population. Sure, pollution and deadly weapons are bad, but unfortunately by getting rid of science and industry will certainly not solve the problem, instead, better science and industry will do. And of course, as population and science grow, new problems will be created. So to keep creating problems and to keep solving them, this seems to be a vicious cycle in which we humans are doomed, unless we stop our desire to live life.

Is It Really All About Perspective?

We often hear people saying "It's all about perspective", as if we are all equally ignorant, equally in the dark. While there's a grain of truth in this notion, I found it's not 100% true, because beside "perspective", there is are something called "dimension".

In this illustration two shadows on the walls are two dimensional shaped shadows (square and circle) resulted from viewing this cylinder from two 2-dimensional perspectives. The real "idea" of actually object - cylinder - needs to be seen from 3 dimensional view point, that is, not only looking at it from left and right, but also from "up" - a view point that breaks 2 dimensional surface.