Hard Times

Now, I must rewind a bit and digress... I have recently been reminded of the gem that is Hard Times; I made a post reviewing it a few weeks ago.
Why I love this Dickens' piece:
It is a book that aside from all its defects, stands as a testament of the human condition. In the age we live in, but I wager at gesticulating that it has always been only now it is manifested more pronounced, everything is determined by time. Time is money. Numbers. How much can be gained. Profit and loss. Calculation and hard facts is king.

But what about imagination, what about verse, rhyme, creativity, the beauty of brush strokes on a canvas. Don't get me wrong I am not saying this has disappeared, but I am saying its appreciation has morphed into a different concept. Now, art is money. 

This book is a defense for the arts and humanities, all the studies that cannnot be condensed into a scientific or mathematical equation.

Poetry and prose, in this case, is an idle art, one that is enjoyed internally, it has no objective benefits be it for the edification of the soul. One enjoys this pastime when there is nothing to do; it doesn't require from us anything concrete, no precision, just a moment, and that moments can transform into a space where the concept of time and its passage disappears.

It is evident in the ever present surge of art, that the "arts" are a human necessity. It allows us to escape, to dream, to believe. And precisely this is what Hard Times proposes and in my opinion achieves. In this book we see two opposing spectrum, and these two ideas and beliefs play out in this book until the end. From its' pages I deduce that Charles Dickens was opposed to the stifling of the arts and it is this that shines brightly in this book: the point he conveys and case he places before the reader.

So, read, explore and learn, there is nothing more entertaining than to let the imagination soar.


Hard Times by Natalia L Forty is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.