The end of August looms, and it’s hard to feel hopeful. For we are all but cogs in a societal machine whose scope is far beyond our will and comprehension, and without long, balmy summer days spent forgetting ourselves via media-manufactured fears of sharks as we swim in unsettlingly warm, oil-slicked ocean waters, it’s all to easy to remember how doomed our lives truly are. In keeping with the hopelessness that the coming season brings, we offer a guide for dressing like your favorite ruined literary hero(in)es.
“Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?”
“Yes.”
“All like ours?”
“I don’t know, but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound — a few blighted.”
“Which do we live on — a splendid one or a blighted one?”
“A blighted one.”
— Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
“Everything, even herself, was now unbearable to her. She wished that, taking wing like a bird, she could fly somewhere, far away to regions of purity, and there grow young again.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
“They stood together in the gloom of the spruces, an empty world glimmering about them wide and gray under the stars”
― Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome
Thanks, as always, to Kelly Schmader, whose esteem for sharks is a lesson to us all.
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