"[H]e . . . smiled with the singularly beautiful irradiation which is seen to spread on young faces at the inception of some glorious idea"

Of all the tragic elements that frame the story of Jude the Obscure, the most poignant for me involved Jude's noble attempts to gain a footing in the hallowed halls of higher education. As an orphaned, poor, and, you know, obscure village boy, Jude burned with a desire to learn. For years he snatches at what crumbs of knowledge he can, stumbling blindly but so sincerely through whatever books he manages to get his hands on, pursuing the best course of education he can devise in his circumstances.

His unsuccessful bid for a place in the university classrooms put me in mind of what unprecedented access we have to everything Jude wished for so dearly. How vast and cheap is knowledge now! For all the detriments a wired, information-glutted society has, things are so much better. We can't desire to go back. Nostalgia for a simpler, slower-paced time is misplaced and ungrateful. Poor Jude; the picture of the bright young boy eager to learn and so piquantly frustrated in his quest will continue to prick me.

Jude had quite unexpectedly found good employment at his old trade almost directly he arrived, the summer weather suiting his fragile constitution; and outwardly his days went on with that monotonous uniformity which is in itself so grateful after vicissitude. People seemed to have forgotten that he had ever shown any awkward aberrancies: and he daily mounted to the parapets and copings of colleges he could never enter, and renewed the crumbling freestones of mullioned windows he would never look from, as if he had known no wish to do otherwise.