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The Vagabond

IN PROPER FOCUS

It is one thing actually to see something; and it is quite another thing to read and then see it, since there is bound to be a difference in the two pictures which meet the eye. For instance, read a novel, say Hardy's "Return of the Native"--with which almost every student comes in contact sooner or later. As you read, you see the picture of the land through Hardy's words, but you build up a picture of your own with your mental eye. Thus, when he describes the opening scene: "A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment. Overhead the hollow stretch of whitish cloud shutting out the sky was as a tent which had the whole heath for its floor," the Vagabond gets one definite mental picture, while you may get an entirely different impression. Vag's mental picture of tents is always biased by a very rainy camping trip last summer. When Vag hears of lents, it has just got to be raining. To some, however, tents may always mean armies or something.

This, it seems evident, is one of the reasons why so many people are disappointed every time a novel is dramatized or made into a movie. The pictures aren't the same as you or Vag bad imagined. And it's disconcerting. But at least one man Vag knows has made a hobby of finding out just what the correct picture is--the view novelists like Hardy actually saw as they wrote. This man has tramped around a lot and taken many colored photographs of out-of-the-way places like Egdon Heath and Stevenson's favorite hang-outs. Pictures like his can no doubt help a lot to clear up the hazy perspective of fellows like Vag.

So this afternoon at two o'clock, Vag will climb to Emerson 211 to hear Mr. F. W. C. Hersey give his famed illustrated lecture on "The Wessex of Thomas Hardy's Novels."

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