Outsiders Jude Part II and Zuleika (11.8.2005)

I think this section of reading clearly relates to two of the themes of our class. Primarily, Jude seems to recognize the importance of feeling “the mystery”. When he returns to Marygreen to visit his ill aunt, he encounters some of the men in the town. They engage in a discussion of their beliefs about Christminster. While one of the men recalls that “ ‘When I was there for an hour I didn’t see much in it for my part; auld crumbling buildings, half church, half almshouse, and not much going on at that’”, Jude sees the town to be quite different (115). Jude responds,

“ ‘You are wrong, John; there is more going on than meets the eye of a man walking through the streets. It is a unique centre of thought and religion---the intellectual and spiritual granary of this country. All that silence and absence of goings-on is the stillness of infinite motion—the sleep of the spinning-top, to borrow the simile of a well-known writer’” (115).

The two have clearly different perspectives concerning what is Christminster. This, however, just shows that people can interpret places differently. Later in the section, Jude proves that a person can feel the mystery by interpreting a place or object in many different ways. After his intellectual downfall, Jude

“began to see that the town was a book of humanity infinitely more palpitating, varied, and compendious, than the gown life. These struggling men and women before him were the reality of Christminster, though they knew little of Christ or Minster. That was one of the humours of things. The floating population of students and teachers, who did know both in a way, were not Christminster in a local sense at all” (121).

These varying perspectives point clearly to the mystery, to the idea that “whether somebody says I don’t know how anything came to be or God made everything, they are simply pointing to a feeling of the mystery: of how everything is but nobody knows what it really is or how it came to be” (186).

On a different note, Jude’s lament that “ ‘I ought to have thought of this before…it would have been better never to have embarked in this scheme at all than to do it without seeing clearly where I am going, or what I am aiming at…’” brings clear memories of our class exploration of the Tower (116). The symbol of a shell that adorns our campus brings us to the thoughts of “Who am I? Where am I going?” From the beginning of the class, Professor Bump has emphasized self-reflection and recognition of direction, a tenet that Jude is beginning to grasp as a fundamental part of a prosperous life.

In these ways, Jude’s perspectives and realizations provide a clear connection to previous class discussions and explorations.