I’ve been feeling a little out of touch with Booksta for many months now. Actually, I don’t really know what’s going on over there anymore. Mostly because I keep seeing posts that say, I’m not really sure what’s going on here anymore. Lol. For me, I open the app, scroll around, look at a few posts, and leave again. It used to be more difficult to step away from that little bookish world but now when I scroll, I wonder why I am even on there.
Maybe it’s my own bandwidth. Could be changing interests. Perhaps just a gradual shift where I feel I should be spending my time. Growing up; outgrowing it.
But I was there for books and sharing the love and excitement for them, meeting authors, making friends, expressing myself, doing something fun in a story, all the things. I was rarely fussed by metrics and follower counts. Barely use hashtags anymore. Some weird things happened too, people get weird and have their own lives and pressures, I have a tendency to be skiddish. It’s not a place for the faint of heart, I tell you that.
And there were real friendships there. People who started as bookish acquaintances became friends and then became part of my everyday life. And I became part of a community.
Some of those relationships mean a great deal to me. I had my final phone call with one close friend this past weekend. And now we’re over. I’ve been thinking about that. It’s hard to live with a gap where there used to be daily updates, checking in, sharing quotes and making jokes. Tough climate we’re in… or I’m in.
I think it’s difficult not to feel differently about the place where you met them afterwards. How the space, its atmosphere, changes as friendship and relationships created there change too.
So it’s a peculiar environment right now, maybe it always was. We get little fragments of other people’s lives, some real and authentic, others fake and performative. And for someone like me, who assigns meaning to so many things, I’ve been writing a slow burn exit from there for some time… because of that meaning-making. I just don’t fit in I think. Anywhere. (But here I do!)
Anyway, my reading interests have shifted considerably too. Classics, philosophy, psychological fiction, horror. I’ve become increasingly preoccupied with interiority, consciousness, loneliness, human behaviour, and all the complicated ways literature intersects with living. Perhaps a little obsessed, actually.
I’m not particularly interested in keeping pace with every new release, trend or conversation online anymore. Lost enthusiasm for that awhile ago.
But sometimes I still want the conversations. The recommendations. The unexpected connections between books and people. I’m just not sure Booksta is nurturing those connections and conversations. Again, maybe I’m not.
So, another season of recalibration ahead. More time for the books, the writing, ideas I want to follow. And a little less concern about where I fit in.
And Eliot’s insistence that ordinary lives are worthy of extraordinary attention.
Don’t worry, this is not a lament about loneliness.
I simply never expected to crack open a nineteenth-century novel and find an extraordinary mind paying such terrifyingly close attention to everyone.
It’s hard to articulate how I feel about Middlemarch because it goes so far beyond just loving a book. Reading it made me realize what literature can actually do to a person. For me, reading isn’t a hobby or an escape from reality; it’s company. This year especially, it handed me the rare experience of spending time with a mind whose interests, questions and observations became familiar enough to feel like an actual friendship.
George Eliot was giving me those friendship vibes in spades. Honestly, she was giving me me vibes, too. I don’t mean that I possess a fraction of her brilliance or imagine myself operating anywhere near her intellectual stratosphere. It’s her relentless, sustained obsession with the interior lives of regular people that felt so intimately familiar.
I can be a voracious reader at times (sometimes not at all) because I am completely obsessed with the raw weight of human consciousness. As a massive Clarice Lispector fan, I am always chasing that internal, streaming current of existence and I never expected a nineteenth-century realist like Eliot to map out the contours of the mind with that exact same intensity. Let’s just say I am a voyeur for the soul; I cannot stop being curious about what it feels like to exist inside someone else’s head and heart.
Eliot was obsessed with all of this too.
Her character work is exceptional because her characters are simply not that… yet they are worthy of extraordinary attention. In fact, the absolute magic of Middlemarch is that it makes the completely ordinary feel intellectually massive. Its people are bogged down by the usual: marriages, money, inheritance, professional anxieties, family guilt and those exhausting daily negotiations of living alongside other human beings. Their lives are small and recognizable. And Eliot finds a universe to examine inside them.
For someone like me… solitary, introverted, and chronically bad at making friends… reading her felt like genuine companionship. She is as close to a “ride or die” as I am ever likely to get.
The Myth of Our Supreme Selves
There is a passage early in the novel that sets the blueprint for how Eliot views humanity.
In Chapter 21, Dorothea is slowly waking up to the grim reality that her marriage to Casaubon will never offer the intellectual or emotional intimacy she fantasized about.
Right there, Eliot drops this absolute banger line:
“We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves.”
I keep returning to the phrase that follows it: “an equivalent centre of self”.
It is such a simple, devastating way of describing the existence of other people. Everyone – literally everyone – has an interior life as complete, chaotic and consequential to them as mine is to me. They have their own anxieties, heartbreaks, private histories and ways of seeing. The universe does not revolve around my interpretation of them.
Dorothea spent months imagining how she might devote herself to Casaubon, how she would become wise through his wisdom and useful through his great intellectual work. What she completely failed to realize is that Casaubon is a real person. He has his own consciousness, his own deep insecurities, and his own separate, troubled understanding of their marriage. She constructed a flawless idol of him without looking at this fragile man standing right in front of her.
It wasn’t obvious to me while I was actively reading, but it is now: Eliot is obsessed with the vast distance between what we assume about a person and the reality of their actual consciousness.
Trying to bridge that distance is a psychological math problem I’ve had to face in my own life recently. What formula do you use? Man, I’m certain it’s infinitely more complex than any differential equation from my 300-level calculus days. Simpler times, I swear.
“But Why Always Dorothea?”
The brilliant thing is that Eliot doesn’t just apply this harsh light to Dorothea, whose idealism makes her an easy target for our sympathy (see above quote by Dorothea).
In Chapter 29, Eliot does something that absolutely captivated me: she literally interrupts the reader’s urge to feel sorry for Dorothea.
She asks the page point-blank, “but why always Dorothea?” and then forces us to march straight into Casaubon’s head:
He has an intense consciousness within him, Eliot reminds us. He is “spiritually a-hungered like the rest of us.”
It felt incredibly jarring at first. Let’s be real: Casaubon is a nightmare to sympathize with. His academic ambitions are poisoned by insecurity, his marriage is toxic with suspicion, and his treatment of Dorothea becomes downright cruel. Yet Eliot insists we inhabit his skin for a hot minute. She forces us to see the tragedy of a man who is highly educated but completely unable to enjoy the world. He’s someone trapped inside what she calls a “small hungry shivering self.”
This is remarkably generous writing, but it’s also incredibly uncomfortable. Eliot doesn’t excuse Casaubon’s behavior by explaining his misery. She just refuses to look away from his pain. By making that subtle shift, she forces us to be honest about his suffering.
So Dorothea is not a saint. Casaubon is not a cartoon villain. Lydgate is not just ambitious, and Rosamond is not just vain. They are all a million times more interesting, more awkward, and more complex than those tidy little boxes. Eliot’s empathy extends to the exact people we would normally dismiss.
The Problem of Seeing Other People Clearly
One of my absolute favourite moments in the book is Eliot’s famous pier-glass analogy in Chapter 27.
Picture a scratched mirror. When you hold a candle up to it, all those random scratches suddenly look like they’re perfectly arranged in a circle around the flame. The scratches are actually scattered everywhere, but the light creates the illusion of a neat, organized pattern. Eliot uses this to show how our own egos do the exact same thing to reality. We are the candle. We see the world entirely through our own illumination, twisting other people’s actions to fit our own interests, expectations, and insecurities.
Rosamond is the undisputed queen of this. She has this almost terrifying ability to bend reality to fit her own aspirations. She looks at Lydgate and doesn’t see a passionate, ambitious scientist, not at all. She sees a ticket to social advancement and the wealthy lifestyle she’s always wanted. His actual work only matters to her insofar as it funds her daydream.
But Eliot doesn’t just make her a flat villain. She gives Rosamond a rich, complicated interior life. We see her upbringing, her vanity and her crushing disappointments too. She’s capable of affection, sure, but she’s also a master at rewriting her own desires as moral necessities.
As Eliot famously notes in Chapter 31:
“There are many wonderful mixtures in the world which are all alike called love.”
A bit of a heavy lift there.
Rosamond’s version of love is all about romance, admiration, and social status. Lydgate’s version is about finding a quiet, supportive domestic backdrop while he goes out and changes the medical world. Neither of them actually sees the other person.
So when they get married, the trainwreck happens in slow motion. Eliot doesn’t rely on massive, explosive drama; she just lets the ordinary frictions in a marriage pile up. There’s a bad decision about money here, a riding excursion there, a conversation that never happens, or a petty refusal to care about what matters to the other person. By the time their financial debts catch up to them, they both have their own entirely separate, deeply entrenched narratives of who is to blame. They genuinely care about each other, but they are completely blind to what the other person actually needs.
That’s exactly why her writing hits so hard. She shows how relationships are built on thousands of tiny, everyday moments. And then how those moments eventually add up to shape your entire life. It’s a tender yet uncomfortable look at how our private explanations end up boxing us in.
The Mental Gymnastics of Nicholas Bulstrode
I’m still pretty new to exploring how literature and philosophy tackle the human ego, but Eliot’s insights have encouraged me to take more of an interest.
It gets particularly uncomfortable when you transition from a troubled marriage to a full-on psychological horror show like Nicholas Bulstrode. Ya, that’s a bit dramatic but also not.
Bulstrode is Middlemarch’s respected banker and a prominent religious figure. He has constructed a pristine public identity around piety, respectability and moral conviction. His private history, however, contains ugly decisions that threaten to blow up everything he’s built.
In Chapter 53, Eliot drops an observation that I think is among the most psychologically perceptive lines in the novel:
“It is but a shallow haste which concludeth insincerity from what outsiders call inconsistency.”
She describes the “living myriad of hidden suckers” through which our beliefs and our actual conduct feed into each other. I love this because Eliot gets how messy we are inside.She knows our ideals and actions don’t neatly line up. We can genuinely think we’re good people while constantly making excuses for the things we do that prove otherwise.
So Bulstrode isn’t just some cartoon villain who knows he’s a liar and smiles about it. He’s done the mental work to convince himself he’s still a good guy. Over time, he’s twisted his explanations of what’s “right” until they perfectly match whatever he wants to do.
But then Raffles shows up, and the past Bulstrode thought he’d buried suddenly walks right through the front door. Eliot calls it an “incorporate past” likely meaning it’s no longer just a bad memory or a vague fear of some cosmic punishment. Here’s the flesh-and-blood reality he never saw coming.
By Chapter 61, his rationalizing reaches its peak, and Eliot hits us with this:
I really enjoyed reading these lines. Maybe because it’s such a killer piece of psychology and because Eliot captures how self-deception actually happens… it’s not sudden, it’s a slow creep. Lying to ourselves happens in real time. Acknowledging that we’re hypocrites is brutal, so we avoid doing it. Instead, we do these quiet little mental rewrites until our actions look totally justified.
The Machinery Behind Behaviour
The scary part is that Eliot makes it clear this isn’t just a Bulstrode trait. It’s a human flaw (or a curse). It’s something built right into the way all of us operate.
And she brings that exact same energy to the rest of Middlemarch. Everyone in this book is constantly striking deals with themselves. They’re just trying to hold onto their self-image while crashing into messy realities, random desires, and crushing disappointments that keep throwing them off course.
She asks us to focus on the sheer friction of human consciousness. Honestly, watching people wrestle with the internal noise of their own minds makes me feel seen. Which is so much better than just sitting back and deciding if they’re a villain or a saint.
Sympathy Requires Imagination
For all her focus on vanity, self-deception and moral trainwrecks, Eliot’s writing is incredibly compassionate.
I don’t mean she coddles her characters. She can be absolutely brutal in her observations. But she gets that real empathy requires us to actually stretch our minds and imagine what it’s like to be someone else.
Dorothea is the perfect example of this.
Early on, she desperately wants to do good. She has a massive heart and a huge desire to be useful. But she’s also young, idealistic, and honestly, pretty clueless about the difference between what she thinks people need and what they actually need.
Marrying Casaubon slaps her with a major reality check about her own blind spots. Later, her run-ins with Rosamond show an even bigger leap in her growth.
By the middle of the book, Dorothea starts to get Rosamond in a way she never could have before. When she sees Rosamond in total distress (and catches onto the mess surrounding Lydgate) she chooses empathy over the local gossip.
These two women couldn’t be more different in personality and life experience, yet Dorothea manages to see right into Rosamond’s vulnerability.
From Abstract to Active
That scene is a big deal because Dorothea’s sympathy goes from something abstract to active. She is willing to step up for someone whose life choices she would have normally struggled to understand. She moves. She acts.
Her growth also changes the whole game for how we understand other people. It shows that real empathy requires us to admit that our own perspective is incomplete. You have to actively try to imagine the headspace of someone whose values and circumstances are completely alien to yours. (Often with little information or evidence of their actual reality.)
And honestly, Eliot expects the exact same thing from us as readers.
She asks us to root for Fred Vincy as he tries to grow up enough to be worthy of Mary Garth. She makes us sit with Farebrother’s money troubles, his crush on Mary, and how much it sucks to make the right choice when it costs you what you want most. We watch Caleb Garth’s dedication to his work and his family, and how much he cares about just doing a good job.
None of these characters are destined for greatness. Their choices are totally ordinary, just the everyday stuff about money, jobs and family. Yet Eliot treats their struggles with the exact same dramatic weight as Dorothea’s disastrous marriage or Bulstrode’s massive scandal.
This could be what I admire most about Eliot. She knows that who we are isn’t defined by the grand gestures, but by how we handle ordinary life.
The Ordinary Things Are the Point
Have you ever noticed how Eliot just gets more and more obsessed with how the tiny, boring things we do every day eventually pile up into something massive?
If you’ve read Middlemarch, or plan to, look at Chapter 72. Everyone is gossiping about Lydgate, assuming the worst because of his ties to Bulstrode. But Dorothea isn’t having it. She remembers him being kind to her when Casaubon was making her life miserable. So when everyone else tells her to play it safe and stay out of it, she just drops this absolute hammer of a question:
“What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?”
Honestly? That might be the most important line in the whole book. Might be my favourite of my whole fucking life.
It’s Dorothea saying that empathy isn’t a feeling, it’s an action. She refuses to just sit back and let local gossip ruin a good man. And think about how she got to this point. It’s because she’s been through the meat grinder herself. She knows what it feels like to be trapped, misunderstood and lonely. She’s learned the hard way how much damage people do when they just take the easiest, ugliest explanation of why someone did something.
So she decides to give Lydgate the exact kind of grace she wished she’d had.
I’ve been accused of lacking empathy, and that accusation absolutely cuts. The truth is, my empathy is massive, but I’ve learned it’s also a liability. I have such a huge capacity for it that I routinely let it erase me, putting everyone else’s emotional state ahead of my own. I don’t give enough back to myself. So when I have to pull back just to survive, it gets misread as a lack of caring. And that hurts. But I guess we all know what it feels like to be misunderstood.
By the time you get to the Finale, Eliot ties everything together in a way that makes me emotional. She follows these characters past the end of the plot, like she’s reminding us that life keeps happening even after this story concludes.
And then she zooms back in on Dorothea. Because Dorothea’s life didn’t turn out to be this grand, historic epic. It was quiet.
“Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible.”
And then Eliot drops the real thesis statement of the novel:
“…the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts.”
God, I love that. It’s the perfect ending for a book that spent hundreds of pages looking at totally normal, unextraordinary people. Dorothea didn’t change the world in the way her younger, idealistic self wanted to. Her impact is invisible. Most of what she did for people stayed behind closed doors. But Eliot is screaming at us that it still matters.
Being patient, being kind, checking in on someone, choosing not to gossip… those tiny, unhistoric acts have a butterfly effect. They change people’s lives, even if nobody ever writes a biography about it.
And in a world that constantly tells us we have to be big and famous and extraordinary to count? I find this so incredibly reassuring.
The Companionship of Being Interested
There’s something more personal I want to say about reading this book. Surprised?
Regarding the loneliness that I am explicitly not lamenting in this post. I’m realizing there is a very specific brand of it that comes from feeling insufficiently known.
I want to be interrogated. I want someone to care enough to ask the boring stuff like my middle name, my birthday, what I’m making for dinner, or what song I have on repeat during my runs. To me, those tiny, ordinary trivia points are everything. I love asking and knowing these things about others. Idk, maybe they aren’t everything to everyone else. But to me, those questions are the only things that say: I see you. I’m actually interested in the person you are, not just the role you fill in my life. Please, by all means, keep rambling.
That is where Eliot broke through the noise. Maybe she felt this sometimes, too. Because she was completely obsessed with the messy, unglamorous undercurrents of being alive. She cared about what people thought when they were doing the dishes, what they wanted but couldn’t say out loud, what they fouled up when nobody was watching. She took the microscopic details of a normal, unremarkable day and treated them like high drama. It was nourishing as well as exquisite.
Intellectual Intimacy
Her prose was a steady weight. For a few weeks, I had the undivided attention of a mind that actually cared about human beings. I could sit in my basement for an evening and read her dissect a fictional man’s ego, or unpack why a woman made a self-destructive choice, or chart the exact distance between a good intention and a bad action. And then, in her own way, insert a layer of her own commentary into it all.
So it wasn’t just reading; it felt like intellectual intimacy. Something I long and yearn for every single day.
Maybe that’s why I’m so protective of this book now. Eliot didn’t bail on her characters when they became difficult or messy or unlovable. She always stayed curious.
This book handed me a sustained, unblinking encounter with the depths of human consciousness.
It gave me another person’s raw intelligence, motivations, limits and understanding to live inside of for several weeks.
What it Means to be Known
I suppose this is ultimately what I am trying to articulate about Middlemarch.
I loved the plot, the messy characters, the sweeping intellectual ambition, and, above all, Eliot’s prose. I loved the experience of reading a sentence and literally having to stop because its observation was so painfully precise. I loved returning to passages, annotating them, and realizing that a line I had underlined five chapters ago had suddenly acquired an entirely different, weightier significance.
But beneath all of that, I just loved the experience of being in the company of someone who was so endlessly fascinated by the lives of others.
Eliot reassured me that ordinary human experiences are worth spending time with… worth examining under a microscope. She confirmed for me that the smallest, most ignored details can tell us everything about a person’s character. She proved that people are always deserving of our attention, even when their behavior is hypocritical, their ambitions are totally unremarkable, or their lives are messy and difficult to understand.
Books aren’t a replacement for real-life relationships or friends. I know that. But I long for true companionship, and lately, I’ve been finding it more and more in literature. So that sustained encounter with another person’s raw intelligence, motivations, limits, and understanding? Absolutely, 100%, without a doubt, my love language.
Finally, more than anything, Middlemarch reminded me of how much it matters to be genuinely, deeply curious about another human being.
It is so unbelievably hard to walk away from the intimacy of Eliot’s mind. Man, I really, really loved her company.
If you can’t tell already, all of this is something I want in my own life, too. To be known in the ordinary details. To have someone interested enough to ask the questions, remember the answers, and remain curious about the person who gave them.
So, if anyone was ever curious enough and wanted to know: November 19 is my birthday.
Welcome to a little dispatch from inside my own literary obsession on the erotics of reading.
I found this book in my search to help give me language for things I’ve been circling a lot this year: the way prose can seduce, disturb, excite, and make reading feel so bodily… and why.
Why am I drawn to the perverse, the psychologically uncomfortable, the transgressive? Why are you? Why aren’t you?
For me, it can be just one sentence that feels like an experience in itself, quite apart from what it is saying.
So yes, Barthes, you have my attention.
Barthes distinguishes between pleasure and jouissance – often translated as bliss or rapture. I’m still turning that distinction over. There’s the pleasure of a good book, and then there’s the pure current of a text that jolts my system, shorts my circuits, or forces a physical reaction.
I’ve talked a good deal about literary encounters, about what happens when a book triggers a chemical spike in me. But I’m increasingly interested in what’s actually happening in those encounters. The doing of language. The surge of being seduced by a sentence. The buzz I get from something repellent or utterly horrific. The total thrill of finding myself charged up by the taboo, the transgressive, the violent. And, no doubt, the pain.
So naturally, I’ve been trying to dissect this somatic frequency of my own reading habits, mapping how words/prose morph into physical reactions for me.
I’m not much of a visual reader, I know that. I don’t necessarily see scenes playing out in my head or construct elaborate pictures of characters and places. Well, I do in dark romance but I’m not considering that here. But I hear the words. There’s an internal voice, and I’m acutely aware of cadence, tone, rhythm, etc.. The way a sentence sounds, certain words, how it’s all put together. The way a character speaks, or thinks. The particular music of a writer’s prose (a nod to Lispector here of course, iykyk).
So how much of that voice do I supply myself, and how much does the writing create? Who knows. But whether I’m reading Clarice or Nabokov or Eliot, I can get caught up in the language without necessarily seeing much of anything. Do you see where I’m going here?
Maybe this is part of what I’m trying to get at with Barthes. It’s rarely what a text means, or even what it makes me feel, but the pleasure of the language itself. The sound of it. The way it moves through my head. The bliss. The rapture.
Oh shit, and I’m near halfway through Eroticism by Bataille and that’s even more exciting. Clearly Bataille and Barthes are deeply connected through some idea that true ecstasy requires crossing a line. Yes, please!
And The Pleasure of the Text has been a great companion work to Bataille because of this. It feels like Barthes handed me the decoder ring for what Bataille is doing. Bataille shows us that breaking taboos is what makes us human, and Barthes proves that language is the ultimate playground for doing exactly that. It seems they both want us to stop reading safely and start reading dangerously. Yes, please!
Anyway. I know I respond to the performance of language as much as its meaning. And I’m curious about what the hell that means and why. So any analysis of the physical, sensual and emotional ecstasy (‘jouissance’) that reading and language can provoke, I’m gonna seek it out.
I seem to have developed a taste for the perverse, the decadent, the transgressive, and the morally questionable. Not necessarily in life (project scope is creeping tho), but certainly in literature. And what began as one book has become a rather suspicious constellation of writers, ideas and things I apparently want to spend my leisure time thinking about.
On my lap now: Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text and Bataille’s Erotism. And Libby has just released The Story of O to me, so naturally I’m starting that immediately as well. Because apparently I’ve decided to spend my weekend in the company of some of literature’s more morally suspect thinkers.
Sade keeps turning up, too. Barthes invokes him early on; he influenced Charlene Elsby’s Violent Faculties, which blew my fucking head off. And then there’s Bataille’s Story of the Eye, which is one particular reading night I’ll always remember. And Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher belongs in this constellation, too. Different territory, but same fascination with repression, power, sexuality, and even violence… all beneath the surface of ‘respectable life.’
Nabokov got me here, no doubt. The seduction of his prose. The manipulation of perception. The sheer, unnerving power of beautiful language to persuade me to see, feel and participate in Lolita. That complicity between writer, text and reader. The possibility that we can be repulsed by what we’re reading and still be utterly captivated by it.
So yes. Give me all the perverse, decadent, transgressive, taboo, and morbidly fascinating works. I want to get into the why of it all. The erotic power of the forbidden. The pleasure of the unsettling. This goddamn massive attraction to what violates my sensibilities, destabilizes my moral footing, and makes me question and immensely enjoy what, exactly, I’m taking pleasure in.
Different projects, obviously. I’m not trying to collapse all these writers into one grand theory. I just want to come at this stuff from every angle. The erotic, the philosophical, the aesthetic, the psychological. What desire does to me, to us; what transgression reveals or conceals; what happens when a text makes something disturbing feel beautiful or electric. And whether we’re even aware of our own responses, let alone how we reckon with them. I’m not sure about anyone else, but I suspect some readers would rather not examine this too closely. Me? I want to analyze the shit out of it.
I seem to be developing a particular appetite for the OGs, too. The older fictions. The ones that were doing this shit before it became familiar territory. For some reason, a lot of contemporary fiction (not all… Heat… ooooo that pierced my heart and was violent AF) just isn’t scratching the itch this year.
I want to go backwards, closer to the source material. I want to know and meet the troublemakers. The ones pushing at the boundaries before later writers inherited, reworked, or reacted against them.
And ya, like all of us nerds out there, there is a growing pile of books with a very specific set of intellectual and aesthetic preoccupations that refuses to leave me alone. What a wild reading trajectory I’m on. Who knew this rabbit hole would go so deep?!
Fuck, I want to be a troublemaker.
Bataille:
Barthes:
André Pieyre de Mandiargues on Réage’s Story of O :
The fact that I’ve just read an eight hundred page novel about ordinary human beings and am suddenly feeling very strongly that I just want to be one of them is perhaps the greatest gift George Eliot leaves you with…
That I understood the very soul of this book.
I have a lot to say about Middlemarch. Far too much for one blog post, probably. There will be more. I already know that.
So before I launch into Eliot’s expansive, psychologically acute, and deeply empathetic voice; or how profound this meditation on the human condition impacted me; or Dorothea and Lydgate and Rosamond and Will, consciousness and self-deception, constraints and desire, and all the other things George Eliot has been surgically dissecting in my brain for the last month, I keep thinking about this line. A standout for me, marked early on. Who knew it would mean so much:
“It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self…”
Being here. Actually here.
No standing outside your own life analyzing it to death, waiting for some more meaningful version of it to begin.
Just being a person here, among other people, with all the ridiculousness and grief and desire and loneliness and affection that comes with it.
I’ve spent all these chapters watching people want things, misunderstand things, fuck things up, justify themselves, hurt one another, love one another, try again, fail again, see each other more clearly, fail to see each other clearly enough.
And through all of it, Eliot says with all the patience in the world:
Look closer. There is always more going on inside a person.
Because the suffering that one feels when they’re navigating human relationships is so real. People trying to reach one another while trapped inside themselves is so real.
And fucking hell, it’s painful too. Because Eliot makes the interior lives of other human beings feel as tangible as our own.
And then, very near the end, my beloved Dorothea says:
“What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?”
Well. Fuck.
That line feels like the whole book somehow.
Again, Eliot sees how complicated we are. She sees our vanity and our blindness and our ridiculous little internal arguments and spirals. She sees how easily we misunderstand each other and ourselves. She sees all the ways we can make a mess of things.
Yet somehow, after all of that, or amidst it, I don’t know, she still seems to believe that other people matter.
Because we fucking do. We are here together.
Things matter. I matter. You matter.
Paying attention matters. Trying to understand another person matters.
And man, sometimes the most meaningful thing we can do is simply make somebody else’s life a little less difficult.
That’s why Dorothea wrecks me.
She wants so badly to do something. She wants her life to matter. She wants to help. She wants to love enormously. And she learns, painfully, that she cannot control the conditions of other peoples’ lives.
But she can show up.
She can see someone.
She can make another person’s life less difficult.
There is so much to takeaway from this book. But for now:
Be here. Be present at the spectacle of life. See people. Let them be real. Let yourself be real. Give a shit about them. Be free to feel. Be free to make mistakes. Help when you can. Love where you can.
And last, I absolutely broke in those final chapters and the finale.
Because, sometimes, a soul requires the full, breathtaking weight of surrendering to those eight hundred pages of Eliot’s luminous, agonizingly human brilliance to truly comprehend the tragedy and beauty of ordinary life.
This book was brutal. Violent. Excessive. Erotic. Psychological. Weird as hell. Torture, rape, fear, forced submission, forced everything really, degradation, pain, pleasure, survival. It pushed in further and further.
And that was the thing.
I wanted all of it.
No, I did not imagine a hairless boy during the reading of this novel.
I wanted the fear. I wanted the power imbalance. I wanted the submission when submission meant attention, favour, protection, survival. I wanted the pain threaded through the frenzied pleasure. I wanted the vulnerability of being completely penetrable, completely exposed, completely at someone else’s mercy.
Oh god. Another book that switched the erotic electricity on in me.
The physical pain alone in this book really got me.
I’ve talked about pain before. I’ve tried to articulate how I feel about it, how I understand it, and how the raw and brutal can be transformed into something intense, charged, almost sublime. There’s alchemy going on in that transformation.
It was a welcome challenge to figure out why a novel like this felt like it had so much more depth than other dark romances I’ve read.
I’ve read Leigh Rivers and thought, yes, finally, something with a little complexity.
But Smith has this particular ability to get past the superficial and plunge straight into the darker depths of desire, fear and human frailty. She carefully and deliberately puts these characters into highly volatile, often forced dynamics and doesn’t let them breathe.
The scenes are violent, and ever so visceral because of the pain inflicted. I felt breathless. Frantic. Reactive.
Most of all, I was reminded how pain is sometimes the only thing sharp enough to make a person feel completely present or alive.
The psychological stuff was fucking intense too.
While the actual plot was fairly light, the graphic writing surrounding all the fuckery was unforgettable. The scenes were very well executed, written not just for shock value, and had some profound psychological undercurrents moving beneath all the depravity.
Perhaps it’s accurate to say this had emotional depth. That could even be an understatement. There were moments of suffocating anticipation. That toxic blend of fear and excitement over what is coming next. The desperate calculations of the characters. Who really has the power? Who is submitting because they want to, because they have to, because they have no other choice?
And Kane.
Kane.
What an astonishing fucking villain.
I didn’t want him redeemed.
I didn’t want him soft.
I didn’t want to discover that in some crevice he is secretly a good man. A better one.
Well, technically, he is alien.
Anyway.
I wanted Kane.
Exactly as he was.
Manipulative as fuck. Total brutality. That intelligence. That sadism. That absolute certainty. He was terrifying and fascinating and completely magnetic to me.
A surprising, softer counterpoint:
There was a parallel, slow burn romance in here to balance the horror. It edged on a desperate tenderness, on the underlying frantic need to be wanted. In reviewing my annotations, it was this part of the story that had my attention the most as far as highlighting goes. Highlights I’ll keep to myself. Some things feel too true to put on the page.
So Heat hit differently.
It didn’t feel like someone had written ‘dark romance’ and simply turned the dial up.
No.
It felt like someone had gone looking for the darkest, kinkiest, most uncomfortable corners of desire and decided to stay there.
For 650 pages.
And somehow it wasn’t even relentlessly repetitive, which is almost ridiculous considering its length and how much happens in it.
R. Lee Smith did not take a breath.
She said:
Here.
Look at this.
You wanted this.
Didn’t you?
And you sit there for a moment and decide whether the answer is yes.
Mine was yes.
Over and over again.
So that’s what I mean by knowing our dark parts.
Some don’t have them. Some of us let them breathe freely, or at least want to. Others may be very good at performing vanilla.
And then a book comes along and exposes you.
Something that makes you stop pretending and admit:
Ever build something then it starts making demands of you?
The ‘Author’ begins with an intention to create ‘Angela’, but Angela becomes increasingly full, weird, independent, contradictory. The more alive she becomes, the less he can contain or explain her.
I finished Breath of Life in two days and I am, once again, affected by Clarice Lispector in ways I don’t quite know what to do with.
I understand her. I just don’t know how to talk about what happens to me when I read her, think with her.
I started underlining and tabbing passages immediately. Thought. Language. Writing. Being alive. The moment before a thought becomes a thought. The space before language catches up with whatever is happening inside us.
That pre-instant of thought.
God.
That’s everywhere in Lispector.
It’s this reaching toward what exists before being organized into something coherent. Like an idea or sentence or formed thought. She makes the act of writing part of the whole thing too, in some urgent manner that just gets me… charged.
And her Author is thinking about thinking, writing about writing, trying to catch something that can’t be caught because it changes when he tries to put words to it.
It all feels dangerous and unstable.
I gravitate to that kind of thing.
It also feels like recording something that already exists isn’t quite enough for the Author. Because the actual act of writing changes the ‘thing’. It moves the shapeless toward shape. It makes something more real, more visible, more alive. And that’s too far… too resolved. Maybe. Do you understand? It’s okay. I don’t. Yet.
And then there is Angela.
Oh gosh.
She comes to life.
She becomes full and whole and complicated and contradictory and increasingly impossible for the Author to hold. I immediately felt she had become too whole to fit his container. His limitations.
That arc completely got me. Because?
Limits. Invisible tripwires in my experience.
Because isn’t that one of the possibilities of creating anything? You begin with an idea that belongs to you. You think you are going to build something. And then, if it becomes alive enough, it starts exceeding the boundaries you gave it. Maybe even the boundaries you retroactively give it.
And this is where Lispector gets me personally. She keeps pressing against the limits of what can be said, what can be known, what can be contained, what can be acted upon.
I don’t think I want things neatly contained.
Well… I don’t want me neatly contained. Drives me bonkers.
And perhaps that’s a reason why she gives me so much fucking voltage.
There is nothing conventionally erotic about Breath of Life. Nothing particularly spicy about it. And yet I experience her writing physically. It has charge. It gets underneath things.
It peels back my own layers. I get to peel them back.
She be like, let’s dig into the psyche.
I say, let’s fucking go!
And then instead of putting everything back or not facing what is there, I let some of those hidden things breathe. Give life to it. Not always. But as much as I can.
That feels important to me.
I have spent a lot of time thinking about what is underneath things. My obsession with excavation has yet to let up.
What are our wants? What do we feel? What don’t we say? What exists before we have language for it? What is truth? What’s the lie?
There’s nothing really sensible about it, but it gets to the honesty of stuff. And boy, do I love honesty. Lispector gives me permission to stay with it for a while. Love that too.
Do you write something you already know? She doesn’t. She writes until she knows something.
So this is all leading to me trying to understand consciousness. Learn it. Not in some grand way, definitely not ‘an authority on it’ (because half the time I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about), but because I know what it feels like to have something exist inside me before even I know what it is. From Agua Viva, it’s the idea of existing in and before the ‘is’.
What a beautiful thing. I want to write the ‘is’.
Sometimes I feel something and try moving toward it with words, and somewhere in there I figure out what I actually think. I want to become a better, more intelligent writer, and I think this is part of what I’m chasing. Lispector seems to do this at a level I can barely comprehend. She gets so close to the thing before it has become a finished thought, and somehow the writing itself discovers it.
I want that. I hope all that made sense?
That feeling of not quite manufacturing the sentence, but letting it come. Flow, I suppose. Surrender, maybe. Again, that’s an Agua Viva throwback.
And then there is:
“I am free to feel.”
It’s burned in my brain now. Forever.
Freedom to feel before understanding. Freedom to contradict yourself. Freedom to be me before the edit.
Now back to our vibrant Angela. She gets to be open too.
Too large. Too contradictory. Too alive to be completely possessed by the person who created her. The person who is threatened by her agency.
So Breath of Life gave me the feeling of watching consciousness become. A becoming that can’t be contained.
Obviously there is no stopping me thinking with Lispector. I’d rather do that than try to explain her.
I started and finished Story of the Eye tonight and I fucking loved it.
French. Erotica. Bataille. Orgasms, urine, semen, blood, eggs, eyes, bullfighting, churches, murder, Simone. A lot of peeing. Maybe too much peeing.
And yet.
What got me wasn’t simply how extreme it is. It was the specificity of the desire. The complete lack of interest in making these wants respectable or explaining them away. Bataille takes sexuality and fetish into places that are strange, grotesque, frightening and sometimes ridiculous, but he doesn’t flinch. And I wasn’t embarrassed by any of it.
There is an urge here. An edge. A willingness to follow desire past the point where it is supposed to stop. It’s aggressive too.
And I admired the hell out of that.
Oh and Simone and the narrator’s match. THIS. THEM. (And dear Marcelle.) Their sexuality isn’t something one of them has to translate into acceptable language for the other. They understand the same strange impulses. Right from the start. They want what they want together. Things that might otherwise remain hidden because of shame… are met.
That hit. I loved it. Beautiful. Artful.
Frick, my whole life I’ve wanted that kind of match. Someone who understands my needs and my sexuality and the things I have never said out loud. Not necessarily someone who wants every single thing I want, but someone who can hear it without recoiling from it. Feeling weird about it. Someone who understands that desire can be strange and specific and difficult (and terrifying) to explain.
(Did I mention I’m a Scorpio?)
It’s easy to read Story of the Eye as transgressive erotica, cuz it absolutely is. But underneath all the fucking madness is another familiar thing I noticed: the desire to find another person with whom you don’t have to hide. Ugh. Felt.
Bataille gives the characters a bit of terrifying freedom to follow the thing they want.
He doesn’t sanitize it. Clearly.
No pretending it isn’t there. It’s full on exposure of himself, his characters.
The last thirty percent was read in a hunting blind with my son, and honestly, I can’t think of a better way I could have finished it.
It’s been a tough week. I was tired. But I was invigorated by this. Sitting beside him, watching and waiting, Kindle in my hands.
Keith Rosson is ridiculously delightful to read. Like Coffin Moon, his writing grabs me immediately and just moves. It’s earthy and wild and fucked up; and completely unburdened by any ‘trying too hard’ vibes. This story has grit, and the prose has that same vibration to it. It pulled me along with ease. Somehow, he can describe a completely “…batshit supernatural thing…” happening and make you see exactly what he means.
And of course, underneath the dirt and insanity is a story about what people will do for the ones they love, and how badly we sometimes need answers. Daughter. Father. Parenthood. Life. Rosson keeps the story tethered to things that actually hurt: family, addiction, loss and love. We all know these matter so much, and they increase the emotional stakes of the story, especially in a world that has gone completely off the rails.
So there I was, sitting in the woods with my son, smelling moss and the damp rot of the forest floor, reading electrifying horror about people hunting for clues, answers, justice, peace.
There was something about that combination that made the whole experience feel… big. Maybe it was the woodsy atmosphere of the whole thing, witchy story included. Nothing particularly dramatic happened. I suppose it was a rather small thing. We were just hanging out there. He was hunting. I was reading. We were together.
But I loved it.
And yes, I’m grieving it.
Oh, the things we have to hold at once as a parent.
Maybe that’s what I want to remember about this particular reading experience. That Crone was fucking awesome. That it spoke, in its strange and terrifying way, to raising a child from infancy to however long we get to have them. That Rosson continues to be an author whose books leave me craving the next one.
But no. It’s not that at all. Not even close.
I simply want to hold tightly to this moment. To the few hours spent listening to heavy drops of rain while watching deer pass by with my son. That’s it.
Horror in my hands.
A kid beside me.
The woods growing dark and cool, the slow decaying earth around us.
A really great Friday night.
“Everything matters.”
I received an advance e-copy of this book from NetGalley for review consideration. All opinions are my own.
Last night I was playing music I used to associate with Christopher Ruocchio’s Sun Eater series, and my mind went… somewhere.
I remembered her.
Me.
The woman I was then. The reader.
I was fucking obsessed with this series.
I made reels about it. I had a music playlist for it. I thought about Hadrian Marlowe constantly. I was completely gone. I loved being inside his voice, his memory, his contradictions, the way he was always telling me a story (his story) while trying to understand the man he had become inside it.
Hadrian was one of the first narrators who made me realize how much I could love inhabiting another consciousness. I didn’t even have that language then. Don’t know if I’m really using it correctly now. I just knew I was completely gripped by the design of it.
So thinking this has to be the beginning, right? Ha. Funny that Sun Eater itself starts with an ending.
I also think I underestimated how much of that experience was about language. Vocabulary. The arrangement of words on the page. Ruocchio can fucking write. There were phrases and paragraphs I tabbed and tabbed. Philosophical passages I underlined. Sentences that could take such an enormous, sprawling story and make it beautifully intimate. And I was so attached. But not only attached to Hadrian’s consciousness; I was attached to the mind that had built the language through which I encountered him.
And underneath all of it was Hadrian’s humanity. God, the humanity. That was always the thing I kept coming back to. For all the scale of the series, for all the history, philosophy, violence, horror and cosmic machinery, there was this man trying to save humanity while being forced to confront almost everything that makes humanity difficult to love.
Then Kingdoms of Death happened.
Fuuuuck.
That book cracked something open in me: horror.
Not “I like scary books.” Not heebie-jeebie stuff. I discovered that I wanted literature that could make me feel deeply uncomfortable. That could trap me inside a psychological and bodily experience and make me stay there. Claustrophobia. Suffering. Pain inflicted on the body. Fear. Suffocating loneliness. The near unraveling of a mind. Someone’s world becoming unbearable and there being nowhere inside themselves to escape to.
I couldn’t stop reading it. I was sweating. Walking. Walking and talking to myself about what the actual fuck I was reading.
I didn’t come away from Kingdoms of Death simply thinking, I love horror now. I think I started to understand what horror could do as a way of studying a person. What happens to humanity when almost everything humane is stripped away? What’s even left? Who will Hadrian be after this?
And then, somehow, I launched into a bizarre and unexpected reading path that doesn’t seem to stop unfolding:
A lot of horror. Really fucking good horror.
Then, the lit happened:
No Longer Human.
The Trial.
Lolita.
The Collector.
The Piano Teacher.
The Vegetarian.
The Yellow Wallpaper.
The Blind Owl.
Agua Viva.
Notes on a Scandal.
The Book of Evidence.
Good grief I love that list.
So I look back at all of these and see something I couldn’t see at the time.
Hindsight. Ugh. If only. Argh… gotta keep it going forward…
I am or have been (or both) searching for a particular kind of reading experience for a long time.
I want to be completely inside another mind. Always. I don’t want to be in mine. It sucks there sometimes.
I want the consciousness, the language, the contradictions. I want the physical experience of being in someone else’s reality, especially when that reality is difficult or disturbing or completely unlike my own. I want to be made uncomfortable. I want to follow a thought somewhere I would and wouldn’t have gone myself.
And Sun Eater was already doing some version of this. Just at a massive cosmic scale.
So maybe Hadrian really was my first encounter with this particular kind of readerly obsession. A man telling his own story, living inside memory, reflection, contradiction, regret and history. A consciousness trying to make sense of itself, of the choices and decision, through the story it is telling.
I just loved it so much. I keep saying it but it’s true.
Point is, I think I want a little more of that woman back.
Not all of her. I’ve changed enormously, and I don’t want to go backward. But I miss some of her edge. Her confidence in speaking her mind. Her spirit. Her ability to get completely absorbed in something because she fucking loved it.
Maybe even some of her capacity for absorbing the tough stuff in life too. The armour. That centre of gravity she had… I admire it all.
I think Sun Eater belongs on a shelf here for those reasons. It belongs there as an origin story. A little artifact from an earlier version of my reading life that turns out to have been pointing toward the reader I am now and becoming.
And fuck me, I gotta reread this series.
‘The Scientist’ by Coldplay, Valka, and Ashes of Man are forever faves.
