A quote that is particularly striking me this evening, and one that I'd like to meditate on a little bit, is spoken by the title character as he faces some characters he's known in the past who confront him about his failed ambitions:
It is a difficult question, my friends, for any young man---that question I had to grapple with, and which thousands are weighing at the present moment in these uprising times---whether to follow uncritically the track he finds himself in, without considering his aptness for it, or to consider what his aptness or bent may be, and re-shape his course accordingly. I tried to do the latter, and I failed. But I don't admit that my failure proved my view to be a wrong one, or that my success would have made it a right one; though that's how we appraise such attempts nowadays---I mean, not by their essential soundness, but by their accidental outcomes.
I think one of the reasons I liked this novel so much was because of quotes like these, and the entire predicament of the title character. He's a man stuck between two worlds, born into one, and trying desperately to force his way into the other. Though, in the end, he fails, his ambition is admirable, and he is somehow, for the most part, able to maintain a shred of hope to nearly the very last, finally becoming jaded just before his sad and premature death. This hope is something I hope to also maintain through to the last, and while my results will hopefully be less tragic than Jude's, I know that these failed ambitions are a very real part of life.
Where Jude and I grow apart in our worldview, and where I am perhaps most disappointed in him as a character, is in the paragraph that follows the above quote:
However it was my poverty and not my will that consented to be beaten. It takes two or three generations to do what I tried to do in one; and my impulses---affections---vices perhaps they should be called---were too strong not to hamper a man without advantages; who should be as cold-blooded as a fish and as selfish as a pig to have a really good chance of being one of his country's worthies.
While I agree that it seems vices are much more difficult to overcome for those of the lower economic classes, I simply cannot, or rather, I will not, accept that Jude's ambitions failed on account of his poverty rather than his will. Indeed he had more will than many, and likely more will than many more financially fortunate men who in fact achieved the goals he originally set for himself, but his continual acquiescence to vice is ultimately what does him in. Sure, we all have our vices. I am no different. But we must, at some point, learn to resist them at critical junctures where our opportunities are made available. Perhaps this difference of opinion is a product of the different times in which our lives our set----the United States in 2010 is certainly much different from Victorian England----but I, perhaps naively, choose to believe that a person of any socioeconomic standing can achieve his ambitions if his will is strong enough both to continue pursuing the goal, and to withstand the temptation of vices (at least when it is most necessary) that would serve to derail him, at least in the time and place that I am so fortunate to be living in.
Perhaps I have not yet lived enough.
But I wish to maintain this hopefulness, be it naivety, stupidity, or gross optimism, so that I can continue to believe in the dreams on which I and my contemporaries have been raised. Should that hope, that dream, that belief system that is so instilled in children of the working class by parents who hope their progeny will have it better, fade away and cease to exist, I, like Jude, will fall into irrevocable obscurity, and I should think that I would meet an end lacking none of the epic tragedy so described in his final pages.
