ABSTRACT
An acknowledgment of Hardy's prevalent and acute awareness of the often absurd, or crushing, conditions of life must be qualified by a recognition that his texts are always contrarily animated by a sense of the expressive needs and possibilities of individuals. In a comment recorded in the Life, dated November 1891, Hardy identifies the process of writing itself with this conflict between the outwardly-orientated motions of the 'soul' and the returning consciousness of life itself, a conflict now explicitly given a tragic inflection:
Dispirited, withdrawn, though the tone of the remark is, the clear implication is still that the truth of the soul is revealed through such 'flights'. This is so, although such passages are fated to fall back into a scheme of things more adapted to depressive, objective, and customary kinds of thinking.
