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.
And then simply weep for it.
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