READ MIDDLEMARCH!

Middlemarch by George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans) – 1871.

The second I put this book down I knew it would be firmly placed on my “favorite books of all time” list (shoulder to shoulder with The Road, East of Eden, Red Rising, Anna Karenina, etc). My review on Goodreads describes my feelings:

“This book is astounding. On the sentence level, maybe the best book I've ever read. Prepare to be underlining and writing in the margin and, yes, looking up words. Many, many times I could do nothing but scribble "WOW!" in the margins because some turn of phrase or paragraph just knocked me on my back with how exquisite the writing was.

George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans) can do things with sentences I've never seen before, and at a consistency that is unbelievable. That amazing feeling when reading of seeing a thought or idea or emotion described with just the right words so that it sings in your soul -- Evans accomplishes that dozens and dozens of times! It's really an embarrassment of riches all within this book. What magic books contain that I can hold in my hand so much wisdom and insight and empathy.”

The key part of this review is the phrase “on the sentence level.” What does that mean? This book, more than any other book I’ve read, has individual lines that take your breath away. Sure, the plot is good and the characters are rich, but the real triumph of this book is the writing itself. The words chosen, the topics discussed, the quick, philosophical asides. It’s truly a master of the English language at work.

Here’s some (too many – I tried to narrow it down, I swear!) excerpts, organized roughly into categories.

Mild spoiler warning. I give context to the quotes, but hopefully not too much to ruin the plot. Proceed with caution.

A character is angry with her husband. She decides to remain upstairs and avoid her husband; she sends a letter via servant to inform him of her choice. She thinks:

“He might wonder and be hurt by her message. It is good that he should wonder and be hurt.”

Eliot then writes:

“Her anger said, as anger is apt to say, that God was with her, that all heaven, though it were crowded with spirits watching them, must be on her side.”

The characer is upset, and in this state she finds it easy to assume that her frustrated actions must be justified, and even correct.

In another scene, Eliot describes a character who has a dark secret. Eliot describes this character:

“He was simply a man whose desires had been stronger than his theoretic beliefs and who had gradually explained the gratification of his desires into satisfactory agreement with those beliefs.”

In other words, he could not sacrifice his identity as a good, morally upright man – and so he warped his actions into accordance with his sense of self – no matter now incongruous.

A character describes her beliefs to another. She says:

“I have a belief of my own, and it comforts me.”

Her belief is:

“That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the Divine power against evil – widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.”

When the other character begins to respond – likely to comment on how her faith resembles some specific religion from some specific geographic location – she cuts him off. She says:

“Please do not call it by any name… it is my life. I have found it out and cannot part with it. I have always been finding out my religion since I was a little girl.”

She feels something within her – her faith – and shrinks against any action to define, to compare, or to reduce it to a word or a religion.

In another scene, a character and her sister discuss jewelry. One is deeply religious and considers jewelry improper for her to wear. She insists, though, that her sister should wear it. The sister feels strange about this situation. She feels:

“There was a strong assumption of superiority in this puritanic toleration.”

She is hurt because, baked into her sister’s insistence that she should wear the jewelry while refusing it herself is a silent comment on which of the sisters is holier/better. Toleration pales in comparison to acceptance, let alone celebration.

A character in Middlemarch is so full of empathy, understanding, and goodness that she elevates the characters around her. Eliot writes about this character:

“The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character.”

When we are seen as a whole person, we begin to view ourselves that way too. Our momentary lapses and greatest mistakes are placed back into the wider frame of our lives and considered evenly with the rest us.

In another scene, a character in great need of aid is nevertheless too prideful to ask for it. This character, “shrank from pity” as though from the plague. Eliot writes:

“Every proud mind knows something of this experience, and perhaps it is only to be overcome by a sense of fellowship deep enough to make all efforts at isolation seem mean and petty instead of exalting.”

The only useful response to one too proud to ask for help or guidance for fear of pity is a deeper love.

Eliot, in another scene, references Plutarch. Antigonus the second, according to Plutarch, said “the theatre of all my actions is fallen” in anguished response to the death of his friend Zeno of Citium. Eliot then adds:

“They are fortunate who get a theatre where the audience demands their best.”

When those we love expect highly of us, we rise (or attempt to rise) to meet their expectations.

In one scene Eliot writes:

“We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps has been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.”

In another Eliot writes:

“We mortals… devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinnertime, keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, ‘oh, nothing!’”

Lastly, Eliot writes:

“Even while we are meditating about the earth’s orbit and the solar system, what we feel and adjust our movements to is the stable earth and the changing day.”

Finally, let's get to my absolute favorites from this book. The ones that made me stop and stare at the wall for a while. There are four of them, in no particular order.

Eliot writes:

“It is an uneasy lot… to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small, hungry, shivering self – never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardour of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim sighted.”

She concludes this thought with the following:

“Behind the big mask and the speaking trumpet there must always be our poor little eyes peeping as usual and our timorous lips more or less under anxious control.”

She writes all of this about a character who is tyranical in his self denial and his complete devotion to what he believes is a serious, all-important work. What the character doesn’t realize, in his strict dedication to his goal, is the glory, the rapturous beauty of the world around him, which he never considered worthy of his attention. And so behind the facade he has constructed that shows to the world a great and important man is a small creature with little experience of what life is really about, worrying himself to death, blind to all but his personal, insignificant concerns, fearful of the powerful emotions that might infiltrate his soul if he allowed them in, and so shutting himself tighter behind his mask.

In one scene, a woman is mildly slighted by her husband. Eliot describes this instance as “horrible,” and then explains her word choice:

“This is a strong word, but not too strong: it is in these acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are forever wasted until men and women look around with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made and say the earth bears no harvest of sweetness.”

What makes this line a “heavy hitter” for me is the final phrase, wherein we blame the earth for the lack of sweetness in the harvest, not the wasted seeds. It can’t be our own choices that has led to an empty, loveless life — no, it must be that the earth was arid and sweetness was never possible. An inevitable pain is easier to bear than one brought about by our own hand.

In this scene, a momentous occasion has occurred in a character's life, but she is disappointed that the joy she expected to feel and anticipated excitedly is not matched by what she is now feeling. Eliot writes:

“Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy, which lies in the very fact of frequency has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind, and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. 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.”

As tragic as the concrete present dispelling our imagined future is, the true tragedy, to Eliot, is “the very fact of frequency.” That we live in a world in which tragedies occur so often we simply cannot bear to consider each of them, is the greatest tragedy of all.

In the final lines of the novel, Eliot describes the impact of the life of one of her characters (these are the closing lines, so if you don’t want to read that, skip to the conclusion!). Eliot writes:

“Her full nature, like that river which Cyrus broke the strength [Cyrus the Great, who is said to have diverted the Euhrates to conquer Babylon in 539 BC], spent itself in channels which had no great name on earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive, for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on un-historic acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.”

That’s it! (It’s not actually it, there are dozens of other lines I could have added but cut so that this post wouldn’t go on forever).

I’m not sure of the point of this post apart from the fact that sometimes when you experience something amazing there’s an innate need to shout it from the rooftops.

I often get overwhelmed with the number of books in the world and the number I will never be able to read, and I get despondent about all the great writing I’ll never experience. Then something like this happens, and I just feel an incredible gratitude that of all the books in the world, I got to read this one. How lucky am I?