OF THINGS to be what they are meant to be, obsesses Hardy.”3 And yet, as she goes on to report, there is a loud note of joyous affirmation of what Derrida called “the free play of the world” and even an affirmation of delight in the plenitude of experience. Working, even struggling, against Nature’s less-than-benign plot, “happiness and hap form the two poles in his work.”4 This means an ironic or sarcastic version of providence as summed up in Hardy’s poem “The Convergence of the Twain,” but one