"The resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible"
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Hardy distills a pattern of human behavior that fuels tragedy: resolve awakens only after danger has ripened into inevitability. We delay naming a harm as harm while it is still small, tolerable, or deniable. By the time conscience or prudence hardens into a vow, the conditions have grown so entrenched that turning away is practically futile. The structure of the sentence itself traces the drift from intention to impotence: a resolution is seldom framed until the evil is so far advanced as to foreclose escape.
That sensibility runs through Hardy’s fiction and poetry. His characters often inch toward calamity through ordinary choices, social pressures, and the slow sediment of habit. They are not monsters but people who postpone decisive action because there seems to be time, because custom excuses delay, because hope whispers that tomorrow will be easier. When clarity finally arrives, it comes as a belated lightning flash over a landscape already rearranged by previous storms. Hardy’s bleak reputation owes less to sensational catastrophes than to this incremental tightening of circumstance, where vows of reform form at the lip of the abyss.
The observation also speaks to moral psychology. Present bias prefers comfort now over risk or effort; status quo bias defends the familiar; normalcy bias edits out warning signs that creep rather than crash. Communities share the same tendencies, turning away from slow harms in economics, ecology, or politics until thresholds have been crossed. We call a crisis a crisis only when it has already become one.
Yet there is an implicit admonition within the pessimism. If resolve is habitually belated, wisdom must be trained to act while consequences are still plastic. Foresight is not just prediction but the courage to interrupt momentum before it hardens. Hardy does not offer easy rescue from fate, but he does diagnose the timing flaw that makes fate feel inevitable, inviting a more vigilant and earlier kind of decision.
That sensibility runs through Hardy’s fiction and poetry. His characters often inch toward calamity through ordinary choices, social pressures, and the slow sediment of habit. They are not monsters but people who postpone decisive action because there seems to be time, because custom excuses delay, because hope whispers that tomorrow will be easier. When clarity finally arrives, it comes as a belated lightning flash over a landscape already rearranged by previous storms. Hardy’s bleak reputation owes less to sensational catastrophes than to this incremental tightening of circumstance, where vows of reform form at the lip of the abyss.
The observation also speaks to moral psychology. Present bias prefers comfort now over risk or effort; status quo bias defends the familiar; normalcy bias edits out warning signs that creep rather than crash. Communities share the same tendencies, turning away from slow harms in economics, ecology, or politics until thresholds have been crossed. We call a crisis a crisis only when it has already become one.
Yet there is an implicit admonition within the pessimism. If resolve is habitually belated, wisdom must be trained to act while consequences are still plastic. Foresight is not just prediction but the courage to interrupt momentum before it hardens. Hardy does not offer easy rescue from fate, but he does diagnose the timing flaw that makes fate feel inevitable, inviting a more vigilant and earlier kind of decision.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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