Musings in Middlemarch

Ive been reading Middlemarch for the first time. I never tackled it before because it looked so daunting, and while I loved Silas Marner, I could not imagine reading 450 pages of Silas Marneresque prose. But Middlemarch is completely different, and, I have found, captivating.

The plot is not particularly exciting. So far I have been reminded often of Jane Austen. The setting is a rural town in England, rather hidebound and consumed with pettiness, but what animates the book are George Eliot's observations about human nature - as precise and sharp as a scalpel, reminding me even of the sword which discerns the thoughts and intentions of the heart, dividing asunder soul and spirit. (I am not making a case for George Eliot as The Holy Spirit, but she does get to the heart of things in a quiet, undramatic but clean cutting fashion.)

After reading several contemporary novels I am happy to read one which has someting to animate it besides a gripping pseudo-moral dilemma revolving around some current hot issue like family abduction, foreign adoption, (I have a little alliteration going on here!), recovered memory syndrome or family secrets. I have been seduced into buying so many books by the cover blurb, only to find that the author may have had a great idea for made-for-TV movie, but she can't write an interesting sentence, never mind a paragraph, or a page, or a chapter, etc. And she has nothing to say that is universally true for all times and all places.

So Middlemarch is a breath of fresh air. I have dog-eared my copy of the book to death, though I am only half-way through. I may yet find the end disappointing, but I rather doubt it. My only unhappiness is that I am reading a second hand copy which has already been underlined and bracketed by the previous reader, so I have to resort to flourescent pink marker to distinguish my favorite parts from his/hers.

Here are a few of my favorite passages, which may provide fodder for future blogs.

We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, "Oh, nothing!" Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts -- not to hurt others.



.. . for we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors and act fatally on the strength of them.


To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.

I especially like the last one, prone as I am to feeling too much on most occasions. Maybe that is, indeed, better than the alternaive.