037: Midsummer in Hardy Country

Fate, love, Farmer Oak, Bathsheba Everdene & the eternal return of summer

It was a typical summer evening in June, the atmosphere being in such delicate equilibrium and so transmissive that inanimate objects seemed endowed with two or three senses, if not five.

—Thomas Hardy

If an omnipotent creature—an angel or other divine force—offered me the chance to pick one literary hero to call into real life, blood-and-bones existence and be my one and only, I am pretty sure it would be Gabriel Oak, the shepherd-hero of Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd.

Farmer Oak, as he is more commonly known in the story, is introduced to us via a description of a smile which extends “the rays in a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun” across his face. That’s what Hardy put into the first sentence of this novel—that the guy has a phenomenal smile.

From there, we are told that Farmer Oak’s a Christian, but that he does get bored at church (ie, he’s got values, but he’s not a dogmatist), that he looks better in his workaday clothes than his Sunday best (ie, the guy’s built…