Middlemarch by George Eliot
I last read this book in college and there are three (count them-3) copies of this in paperback on my bookshelves downstairs. I distinctly remember buying it, losing the first copy and having to buy a second copy, and then magically finding the original. My recollection is that I left it at the soccer field and someone picked it and returned it to me a few weeks later. Where the third copy came from who can say???
In any case, this summer I left my Nook somewhere between my sister's house in Maryland, BWI, the beach house, the beach itself, my other sister's house in NC, RDU and MSP...I know I was reading Pride and Prejudice on the plane on the way to Maryland and I know it did not make its way back to Minnesota so its anyone's guess where in between the darn thing disappeared. I hadn't acquired a new Nook yet so I was "stuck" reading things that are already in my possession which is fine because I love my books. But I digress from my review...oh, and I'll digress a little more to say that I clearly read this book in approximately 1990 because my friend Salem wrote me a note on page 373 and another note on the last page of the book and she dated the note 10/4/90 which was really sweet of her and was really fun to find what seems a whole lifetime later.
On the book itself...delightful. I understand why its on many lists of the best English literature. Its truly a work of art and timeless in so many ways. Its interesting that a book set in the 1830s and published in the 1870s can still resonate so truly in 2019. If nothing else it reinforces the theory that people are people no matter where they live-they find joy and pain in everyday life, they make decisions based on their hearts and not their brains, they bare their burdens courageously or piteously according to their nature and there are the great and the petty intermixed amongst us all. Eliot was a genius and Middlemarch is quite the best book I have read so far this year.
A couple of impressions without going too deeply. First off, Dorothea, while admirable for her deep convictions, was naive, narrowly missing ignorant, when it came to her own best interests. I am sure that we were meant to notice (I don't know how it could be missed) that she and Lydgate were meant for each other. Sadly, he paired up with someone with whom he was desperately unfit as a match, and happily, she found her place ultimately with another, but I think we as readers were meant to note that Dorothea's particular skills and inclinations would have made her a brilliant match for Lydgate and such a match would have been better for everyone concerned. In that way I view the book as a tragedy, one where our heroine is blind to her own best interests and our hero is diverted from his own. Will, I think, is a shadow of the man that dear Dodo deserved and even their happily ever after is tainted with the knowledge that he was no match for Dorothea and that she did indeed in some ways waste her life.
Some quoteable quotes
On life in general:
"If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence."
On marriage:
"The fact is unalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose nature you are acquainted solely through the brief entrances and exits of a few imaginative weeks called courtship, may, when seen in the continuity of married companionship, be disclosed as something better or worse than what you have preconceived, but will certainly not appear altogether the same."
I just liked the way this was written:
"Our sense of duty must often wait for some work which shall take the place of dilettanteism and make us feel that the quality of our action is not a matter of indifference."
On working with what you have, or Eliot's version of the classic if you can't be with the one you want, love the one you're with:
"whether we are to try for nothing til we find immaculate men to work with"?
On the obsession that some parents have over their darling dearests:
"with the sacred ark, otherwise called a cradle"
Something I wish I could convey to my youngsters when things look dire:
"If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind"
A"Trump Aye Yai Yai" moment when it really struck home that Eliot, centuries and continents away from here, had a deep and abiding sense for human nature which transcends time and place:
"Caleb was in a difficulty known to any person attempting in dark times and unassisted by miracle to reason with rustics who are in possession of an undeniable truth which they know through a hard process of feeling, and can let it fall like a giant's club on your neatly-carved argument for a social benefit for which they do not feel." (emphasis on "not" included in the original text-Eliot is f-ing brilliant)
And this quote which as real and truly brings my cousin Teddy to mind as any picture or video could:
"And surely among all men whose vocation requires them to exhibit their powers of speech, the happiest is a prosperous provincial auctioneer keenly alive to his own jokes and sensible of his encyclopedic knowledge."
And finally, a phrase that just jumped off the page at me, another example of her keen insight into the human psychy which helps her bring her characters to life:
"Some gentlemen have made an amazing figure in literature by general discontent with the universe as a trap of dullness into which their great souls have fallen by mistake; but the sense of a stupendous self and an insignificant world may have its consolations."
In any case, this summer I left my Nook somewhere between my sister's house in Maryland, BWI, the beach house, the beach itself, my other sister's house in NC, RDU and MSP...I know I was reading Pride and Prejudice on the plane on the way to Maryland and I know it did not make its way back to Minnesota so its anyone's guess where in between the darn thing disappeared. I hadn't acquired a new Nook yet so I was "stuck" reading things that are already in my possession which is fine because I love my books. But I digress from my review...oh, and I'll digress a little more to say that I clearly read this book in approximately 1990 because my friend Salem wrote me a note on page 373 and another note on the last page of the book and she dated the note 10/4/90 which was really sweet of her and was really fun to find what seems a whole lifetime later.
On the book itself...delightful. I understand why its on many lists of the best English literature. Its truly a work of art and timeless in so many ways. Its interesting that a book set in the 1830s and published in the 1870s can still resonate so truly in 2019. If nothing else it reinforces the theory that people are people no matter where they live-they find joy and pain in everyday life, they make decisions based on their hearts and not their brains, they bare their burdens courageously or piteously according to their nature and there are the great and the petty intermixed amongst us all. Eliot was a genius and Middlemarch is quite the best book I have read so far this year.
A couple of impressions without going too deeply. First off, Dorothea, while admirable for her deep convictions, was naive, narrowly missing ignorant, when it came to her own best interests. I am sure that we were meant to notice (I don't know how it could be missed) that she and Lydgate were meant for each other. Sadly, he paired up with someone with whom he was desperately unfit as a match, and happily, she found her place ultimately with another, but I think we as readers were meant to note that Dorothea's particular skills and inclinations would have made her a brilliant match for Lydgate and such a match would have been better for everyone concerned. In that way I view the book as a tragedy, one where our heroine is blind to her own best interests and our hero is diverted from his own. Will, I think, is a shadow of the man that dear Dodo deserved and even their happily ever after is tainted with the knowledge that he was no match for Dorothea and that she did indeed in some ways waste her life.
Some quoteable quotes
On life in general:
"If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence."
On marriage:
"The fact is unalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose nature you are acquainted solely through the brief entrances and exits of a few imaginative weeks called courtship, may, when seen in the continuity of married companionship, be disclosed as something better or worse than what you have preconceived, but will certainly not appear altogether the same."
I just liked the way this was written:
"Our sense of duty must often wait for some work which shall take the place of dilettanteism and make us feel that the quality of our action is not a matter of indifference."
On working with what you have, or Eliot's version of the classic if you can't be with the one you want, love the one you're with:
"whether we are to try for nothing til we find immaculate men to work with"?
On the obsession that some parents have over their darling dearests:
"with the sacred ark, otherwise called a cradle"
Something I wish I could convey to my youngsters when things look dire:
"If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind"
A"Trump Aye Yai Yai" moment when it really struck home that Eliot, centuries and continents away from here, had a deep and abiding sense for human nature which transcends time and place:
"Caleb was in a difficulty known to any person attempting in dark times and unassisted by miracle to reason with rustics who are in possession of an undeniable truth which they know through a hard process of feeling, and can let it fall like a giant's club on your neatly-carved argument for a social benefit for which they do not feel." (emphasis on "not" included in the original text-Eliot is f-ing brilliant)
And this quote which as real and truly brings my cousin Teddy to mind as any picture or video could:
"And surely among all men whose vocation requires them to exhibit their powers of speech, the happiest is a prosperous provincial auctioneer keenly alive to his own jokes and sensible of his encyclopedic knowledge."
And finally, a phrase that just jumped off the page at me, another example of her keen insight into the human psychy which helps her bring her characters to life:
"Some gentlemen have made an amazing figure in literature by general discontent with the universe as a trap of dullness into which their great souls have fallen by mistake; but the sense of a stupendous self and an insignificant world may have its consolations."
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