영어로 읽는 고전 _ 템플 서스틴의 못생긴 남자의 사랑이야기
E. Temple Thurston의 『부활의 정원: 못생긴 남자의 사랑 이야기』는 20세기 초에 쓰인 소설입니다. 이야기는 외로움에 잠긴 자기 성찰적인 한 남자를 중심으로 전개되며, 그는 자신의 추함에 대한 인식과 인연 및 사랑에 대한 갈망 사이에서 씨름합니다. 이러한 내면의 갈등은 여러 인물들과의 만남을 배경으로 펼쳐지며, 그 만남들은 그에게 삶, 아름다움, 그리고 인간 조건의 고투에 대해 숙고하게 만듭니다. 소설의 서두에서 이름 없는 주인공은 공원에 앉아 지나가는 사람들을 관찰합니다. 수선화를 든 장인과 유모가 그중에 있는데, 그는 그들을 부러워합니다. 그들의 교감의 순간은 그의 마음속에 그리움을 불러일으키며, 이는 그 자신이 느끼는 고립감과 자기혐오와 극명하게 대비됩니다. 그는 스스로를 영원히 손에 닿지 않을 것 같은 동반자 관계, 특히 여성들의 관심을 갈망하는 "못생긴 악마"라고 드러냅니다. 도입부는 관계, 사랑, 그리고 인간 경험에서 아름다움이 갖는 의미에 대한 그의 탐구의 무대를 마련하며, 타인과의 교류, 특히 클라리사라는 인물과의 만남을 축으로 한 잠재적인 변화의 여정을 암시합니다.
Classics Read in English _ The garden of resurrection : being the love story of an ugly man by Thurston
E. Temple Thurston's The Garden of Resurrection is a quiet study of a man at war with his own reflection. The unnamed protagonist considers himself grotesque?an "ugly devil" unworthy of love or tenderness. He sits alone in a park, watching strangers share fleeting moments of connection: a workman cradling a narcissus, a nursemaid exchanging glances. These small intimacies, so effortless for others, feel impossibly distant to him. His loneliness is not merely circumstantial but existential, rooted in a conviction that beauty is the price of admission to human warmth. Yet Thurston does not leave his protagonist stranded in despair. The arrival of Clarissa hints at redemption?not through the erasure of ugliness, but perhaps through the discovery that love sees what mirrors cannot. The novel unfolds as a meditation on whether a soul, long buried in self-loathing, can learn to bloom again.
Among the contents
It was the first, the very first, day of spring. A man walked by me with a narcissus in his coat and he was humming a tune.
By the looks of him?the tail-coat, the bowler hat, the little leather hand-bag?he was an artisan. You know that game of placing people. I put him down as an electrician. He had been attending to a job up West. He was returning to the premises of his firm in Bond Street. All this, of course, was surmise. But of one thing I was certain. He had no business to be walking through the Park. He ought to have been on a 'bus, or in the Underground Railway, speeding back to save his firm's most precious time, ready to start forth once more upon his firm's most urgent errands. Instead of this?it was the first day of spring?he was walking through the Park and I was envying him. I envied the narcissus in his coat. Even the very tune he was humming touched a sense of covetousness in my heart.
"Nor his ox," thought I, "nor his ass, nor anything that is his." A very stern Commandment that; for even as I took off my silk hat and brushed the rim of it once with my sleeve, I envied him for his tail-coat and his billy-cock.
