"Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change"
About this Quote
Hardy pins a small psychological paradox to the wall: we live inside time, watch it remaking faces, towns, beliefs, and still there is a stubborn kernel in us that reacts like a newcomer. The line isn’t sentimental about “growth”; it’s quietly accusatory. If time truly “changes everything,” why do we keep meeting change as if it violates the rules?
The trick is the split Hardy draws between the world’s obvious mutability and the self’s secret craving for continuity. “Except something within us” suggests an inner witness that refuses to be fully historicized. It’s not the romantic soul so much as the nervous system of identity: the part that insists the present should behave like the past, even when experience has repeatedly taught otherwise. That “always” matters. Surprise isn’t a one-time naivete; it’s a chronic condition.
Hardy’s novels are crowded with characters blindsided by modernity’s slow violence: shifting class structures, industrial encroachment, moral codes wobbling under new pressures. In that late Victorian context, change isn’t a quirky twist; it’s the air. Yet Hardy implies that adaptation is never complete. People can learn the facts of change and still feel its emotional illegitimacy.
Subtextually, the line reads like a diagnosis of grief. Loss is change with teeth, and the shock of it keeps returning because the inner self continues to expect permanence. Hardy turns that expectation into tragedy’s engine: time will do what it does, and we will keep acting surprised, which is another way of saying we remain human, and therefore vulnerable.
The trick is the split Hardy draws between the world’s obvious mutability and the self’s secret craving for continuity. “Except something within us” suggests an inner witness that refuses to be fully historicized. It’s not the romantic soul so much as the nervous system of identity: the part that insists the present should behave like the past, even when experience has repeatedly taught otherwise. That “always” matters. Surprise isn’t a one-time naivete; it’s a chronic condition.
Hardy’s novels are crowded with characters blindsided by modernity’s slow violence: shifting class structures, industrial encroachment, moral codes wobbling under new pressures. In that late Victorian context, change isn’t a quirky twist; it’s the air. Yet Hardy implies that adaptation is never complete. People can learn the facts of change and still feel its emotional illegitimacy.
Subtextually, the line reads like a diagnosis of grief. Loss is change with teeth, and the shock of it keeps returning because the inner self continues to expect permanence. Hardy turns that expectation into tragedy’s engine: time will do what it does, and we will keep acting surprised, which is another way of saying we remain human, and therefore vulnerable.
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