With chills, I finished Middlemarch two days ago. It has to be one of my favorite books I've read, and definitely a wonderful way to start 2015.

While wrapping it up, I wondered if a book like Middlemarch could be written today--a book of such interconnected lives in a town where it mattered quite a lot who your parents were and everyone had something to say about which profession and which mate you chose, but of course a book like that couldn't be written now, not in contemporary Chicago, at least. There's so much distance in time and culture, not to mention country!

I want to read The Brothers Karamazov once I finish my Leopold and Loeb book, and to prepare I read Virginia Woolf's essay "The Russian Point of View." Despite it's confident title, it's refreshingly open and honest about the difficulty of truly knowing and understanding the viewpoint of a culture so unlike our own. Americans write about English culture, yes, and they can offer "a special acuteness and detachment, a sharp angle of vision[...]; but not the absence of self-consciousness, that ease and fellowship and sense of common values which make for intimacy, and sanity, and the quick give and take of familiar intercourse." Living in a large city like Chicago I'm especially aware of the disconnect between neighbors. I don't know people like the residents of Middlemarch knew each other--I don't even know the people in my building. Howard counters with descriptions of his hometown of Jay, where everyone knew everyone else's business. It's the city that makes me feel disconnected, he said, not necessarily our time and culture.

A few weeks ago I was lying on the couch and felt just the oppressiveness of how many people were around me, living in their little rectangle spaces, with lives that didn't touch mine, or if they did, not in ways I knew. The woman upstairs especially disconcerted me. I thought about how I knew nothing of her apartment, which is her whole life, at least, mine feels that way; these few rooms and the beings inside them are my life, what I work for and come home for and think about, and it was claustrophobic and unbalancing to think there were all sorts of lives above me, around me, and across from me, multiplied and multiplied.

And every one of them matters, Eliot says, but especially the ones who do good, even quietly. Those who channeled their energies towards the betterment of lives for those around them make a difference, and we have them to thank for our lives being not so uncomfortable as they might be.