Naked Day/Orange Juice Day/National Day Of Prayer/International Firefighters' Day/Relationship Renewal Day/Significant Other's Day/Tulip Time (Iowa)/Cinco De Mayo (Texas)
2006-05-04 @ 8:58 p.m.

Tests today didn't go as smoothly as they did the last few times, but no big deal, I guess. Have resumed reading Far From The Madding Crowd, and I like it. Doesn't quite reach the intensity of The Return Of The Native so far, but you can see the development from Under The Greenwood Tree. Mr Purvis has a point when he says that Hardy's novels should be read in chronological order. Was flipping through the ending, a bad habit of mine that frequently results in an unfinished book, when I came across this passage that so eloquently conveys what I'm looking for. So here it is:

"They spoke very little of their mutual feelings: pretty phrases and warm affections being probably unnecessary between such tried friends. Theirs was that substantial affection which arises (if any arises at all) when the two who are thrown together begin first by knowing the rougher sides of each other's character, and not the best till further on, the romance growing up in the interstices of a mass of hard prosaic reality. This good-fellowship - camaraderie, usually occurring through similarity of pursuits, is unfortunately seldom superadded to love between the sexes, because they associate not in their labours but in their pleasures merely. Where however happy circumstance permits its development then compounded feeling proves itself to be the only love which is strong as death - that love which many waters cannot quench, nor the floods drown, beside which the passion usually called by the name is evanescent as steam."