Jude Part 1

Hey Jude -The Beatles

Hey, Jude, don't make it bad
Take a sad song and make it better
Remember to let her into your heart
Then you can start to make it better

Hey, Jude, don't be afraid
You were made to go out and get her
The minute you let her under your skin
Then you begin to make it better.

And any time you feel the pain, hey, Jude, refrain
Don't carry the world upon your shoulders
Well don't you know that its a fool who plays it cool
By making his world a little colder

Hey, Jude! Don't let her down
You have found her, now go and get her
Remember, to let her into your heart
Then you can start to make it better.

So let it out and let it in, hey, Jude, begin
You're waiting for someone to perform with
And don't you know that it's just you, hey, Jude,
You'll do, the movement you need is on your shoulder

Hey, Jude, don't make it bad
Take a sad song and make it better
Remember to let her into your heart
Then you can start to make it better

Good thing this song wasn't around when Jude was running after Sue. I can't say as "let[ting] her into [his] heart" would "start to make [anything] better".


In typical Hardy fashion, the main character is totally screwed from the beginning. Jude has ended up with nothing but a grumpy caretaker and some crazy dreams. In your average feel-good story, Jude would end up making it to Christminster after a long journey and end up wealthy and happy with a sexy wife and loads of friends.

Not so with Jude.

This really doesn’t happen in our society anyway. Sometimes you’d be that lucky, but most of the time you are fortunate to get one part of your dream to come true. Somehow, Jude hangs in there.

Cat mentioned in her post that breaking up with her boyfriend was liberating for her as she continued with college in another city. I’d have to say that my experience has been the opposite. I’ve always felt a little bit ahead of my age at times, especially with being such a tall female for most of my life. I literally was a “head above the rest.” But when I started dating my boyfriend, whom I’d known for years beforehand, during my senior year of high school, things changed. I’d have to say that as a result of dating him, I’ve become more open-minded in college. There are new things that I try that I wouldn’t have if he hadn’t been as adventurous and outgoing as he is. I’ve always been a picky eater (I didn’t like pizza for the longest time) but since the guy I’m with eats everything and always tries new things, I wanted to be more daring myself (even though food isn’t scary).

Despite the fact that Jude’s marriage to Arabella was a bad call on his part, it actually did open him up to new things and increase his sense of adventure. It made him more prepared to deal with a new life (and new doubts) in Christminster, “He might battle with his evil star, and follow out his original intention” (61). But in opening him up to new things, his marriage to Arabella also made him more aware of his need for love, and caused his unrelenting and madman persistence in wooing and capturing his cousin Sue, even to the point of supporting her marriage to Phillotson, which he despises, “Of course I wish you joy! And also of course I will give you away” (136). In marrying Arabella, he was introduced to more responsibilities: he knew love, and also knew of its pitfalls.

College is full of ups and downs, and oftentimes we don’t know how to handle things except by running away (or dropping a class, or changing a major, or finding new friends). Jude chose to leave his marriage instead of working things out, which is in stark contrast to his pursuit of learning at Christminster and his love for the fickle and noncommittal Sue. But what if he had let those dreams die too?

A Dream Deferred (Langston Hughes)

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

It’s up to us to decide which dreams to keep and which dreams to starve. College is a common time to make those decisions, whether we like it or not. College is made out to be one of two things: a party, or a lot of hard work. People always tell high school seniors that they will grow up and learn more about themselves in college (in many flowery and inspiring words on plaques or statues of graduates or Chicken Soup books)

but we don’t really believe them until we’re here and we realize that it is true. Your high school reputation doesn’t follow you in college, and it is up to you to reinvent yourself if you choose. Jude began this work in preparation for college, and perhaps by the end he will at least have this dream come true.

Liberal Arts

When I came to the University of Texas in 2006, I wasn’t completely sure of my major. I had been torn between English and nursing, and had settled on the idea of transferring to nursing after I’d been at UT for a while. At some point along the way that first semester, I resolved to stick with English but quickly decided after some feelings of embarrassment and futility in my E 314L class to make a change for real this time to Linguistics. Indeed, I am not an English major as my mother had hoped and my father feared. But now I am worse off; I have traveled into uncharted territory that they have never been exposed to, and my talk of morphemes, the IPA, and phrase structure trees has them a bit concerned. See, my parents had their majors picked out in elementary school. They set out on their freshman years for engineering and English, and by golly, that’s what they graduated with. The fact that I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I came to UT was appalling, and my continued search for a lucrative future career has them frazzled.

Fortunately, Giametti has my back on this one. “What I wish you to avoid, as you continue your journey, is the desire to try to arrange all of the future now” (321). I don’t have to know what I’m doing yet. I’m only 19.

I know I am not the only one feeling this urgency. It seems as though our culture contradicts itself all over the place in telling us how to do things. We’re pressured by family and friends to get jobs before we’re out of high school, and yet more experience as you get older makes you harder to hire (you have to be paid more for your schooling and efforts). Even UT itself does this. We get the vibe that we are supposed to love learning and take our time to develop ourselves as civil and well-educated human beings, yet we get tuition rebates (money) if we graduate “on time”.

Once we leave the University, our bubble disappears. As Giametti says, “We strive for a civil society through the consideration of people on their merit and through the free, open, and frank exchange of ideas” (321). We are told to be open minded, but the fact of the matter is, in the real world you aren’t considered valuable by many if you don’t have the right car, house, job, physical appearance, personality, or friends.

People are closed minded. Maybe this is a result of what Palaima says is happening, “Students who leave the Forty Acres, as many do now, without knowing themselves, without testing what they can best do for themselves and for other people…without developing cultural passions, have not gotten the education they should have been given” (324). But I would argue that we can be coddled into thinking that the University will make us grow up without considering that we have to learn to deal with a world that hasn’t gleaned from the University experience what they should have (in addition to other people who haven’t had this experience).

Bate would say that the people who view all of this and make others aware are the poets, those who, “[have] no character…no identity,” that [they] [are] “annihilated” in the characters of others and [concern] [themselves] solely with revealing their essential natures…” (339B). He would probably argue that the Liberal Arts education would equip the poets thus. And I would agree. We need more people to analyze, well, people, not just computers or numbers or businesses. (Though these all involve many people in principle). I couldn’t be happier that we are trending toward the value of right brain faculties according to Pink. We need more business students in Victorian Literature. Hopefully they’ll wander over here someday.

Universities

A topic brought up in my Cultural Anthropology class today was the differing definition of “culture” over the last two centuries or so. In the time of Newman’s statements, “culture” was a verb; a word meant to mean growth, such as one might cultivate a crop of corn, or what have you. Today, this same definition still stands, but only if you are a member of Horticulture Club or manage a greenhouse on your property; not a word the average college student uses. “Culture” these days means, to quote my Anthropology professor, Dr. Suzanne Seriff, “the system of values and meanings about the nature of experience that are shared by a people and passed on from one generation to another.” Both definitions can apply to our university experience. The stereotype among college students is that the university described by Newman was stuffy and stuck-up;

rather unlike the view of most undergrads of UT, which is a known party school and home to many different campus organizations and communities.

Peter T. Flawn cited Newman, “[he] argued brilliantly that the university exists for one purpose—the culture of the intellect” (306). This quote represents the agricultural definition; that minds are meant to be grown and matured, and are ready to be pruned (graduate) only after a certain amount of knowledge has been attained after much hard work. But, our own Texas Congress member President Mirabeau B. Lamar says that, “If we desire to establish a Republican Government upon a broad and permanent basis, it will become our duty to adopt a comprehensive and well regulated system of mental and moral culture (304). This emphasizes not only the importance of academics in universities, but also the moral well-being of the students as well as unification and community in society as a whole; the shared “nature of experience” by today’s “culture” definition.

Another response I had to the reading was about the urbanization of universities. I see this as a product of our continued urbanization in the country and around the world. In waiting for a friend, I wandered through the main building, which shows pictures of UT back in the early days, when there were few buildings, large patches of grass, and tiny trees around the “six pack”. These days, we have the “south lawn” and the “battle oaks”, but what else remains of nature on this campus? Waller Creek is horribly polluted, especially after the oil spill last week, and the few trees we do have are well manicured and as stiff and academic as the walls around us in newer buildings such as the Seay building and the PCL. Newman recounts the Proctor of the German nation’s mourning the loss of beauty of the University of Paris, “ ‘Whither shall the youthful student now betake himself, what relief will he find for his eyes, wearied with intense reading, now that the pleasant stream is taken from him’” (315)? I only wonder how long it will be before we lose even the last bit of nature we see on this campus to advertising, business, or concrete monuments and statues of heroes of old.