"A book may not tell us exactly how to live our own lives, but our own lives can teach us how to read a book."

-From Here to Middlemarch

Mead is talking about reading Middlemarch as a stepmother, but I find this a great quote about the experience of reading Victorian novels as a gay man in the 21st century, when I sometimes struggle to see myself represented. There are so many truths and so much compassion for humanity in Middlemarch that it is so relevant and "urgent" as Mead says, even today and even to me, and I love how Mead values the reader's perspective in the experience of the text. More than valuing, she's saying look at your life, it can help you understand what this woman over a hundred years ago was saying about it.

I feel like a contemporary Mary Garth would dig this song:

I think she would share it with Fred.

"Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it's a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself."

From the Prelude to My Life in Middlemarch, by Rebecca Mead, which Elise gave me yesterday.

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.

The other night Howard and I had my friend Mitch over for dinner. We made an attempt at cavatelli pasta and meat sauce, and had salad and wine. Afterwards I took a hot bath and read. I'm in the last section, "Sunset and Sunrise," and finding it more moving than ever; especially touching is the marriage between Harriet and Nicholas Bulstrode. Who would think such an unpleasant character could call forth such emotion? But really, it's because he married well.

I wanted a big, long book to last me through the winter, and of course I'm finishing it only four days into the actual cold and snow of Chicago winter.

So I was in Dunkin Donuts yesterday, eating my lunch among the retirees, bus drivers, and Ethiopians that make up Chicago DD clientele. I had my book with me, and unlike when I was reading Jane Austen, no one talks to me about Middlemarch. I think maybe a lot of people don't know about it, or at least haven't read it. But this older gentleman who was eating lunch with his wife stood up, came to my table, tapped my book and said with bright, excited eyes: "This book is amazing," or something that sounded more educated and articulate. He said: "I think this is the best book in the English language. It's hard to describe what makes it so good." And I looked up at him and was like "Yas, Gaga, yas," and his wife, standing on her walker in her bad orange wig, hollered: "Arthur! Let's go!" He ignored her and continued extolling the virtues of Middlemarch, asked if I was reading for fun or for college (!), and then went to pay at the counter, which didn't stop her from demanding in a horrible mix of plaintive and domineering: "Let's go, Arthur!!!" 

When he came back around he leaned over the table and said: "Do you know what happens to Lydgate yet?" 

Since I haven't reached the ending, but I have a good idea, I said: "No?" 

"He makes a bad marriage." 

"C'mon, Arthur, let's go!"

He put on his coat and followed his wife out. Before they left, he turned back to me and raised his arms helplessly, gesturing to his wife, like "See?" 

Howard shared this beautiful podcast with me tonight:

http://www.nytimes.com/ref/books/books-podcast-archive.html?pagewanted=all (from January 26th, 2014)

It's a New York Times Book Review podcast with Rebecca Mead discussing her memoir My Life in Middlemarch. It's so inspiring and beautiful and will make you want to (re)read Middlemarch. I loved hearing her talk about something I am currently enjoying, and it also opened my perspective up to a wider, more compassionate view of the novel and its characters.

In this review of the memoir by Joyce Carol Oates, she quotes Virginia Woolf as saying Middlemarch is "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people." Ha! I'll have to find her essay on George Eliot. I'm sure I have it somewhere.