A favorite part from my reading this month was when Celia gets the first hint that Dorothea has some sort of attraction to Casaubon. Their uncle announces that C. is coming for dinner, which in itself isn't noteworthy, but I love the description of Celia following her uncle's gaze and seeing this on Dorothea's face: 

"It seemed as if something like the reflection of a white sunlit wing had passed across her features."

Beautiful. 

Celia is "really startled," she feels "disgust," vexed, "a sort of shame mingled with a sense of the ludicrous." Then we get this description of their day:

"The day was damp, and they were not going to walk out, so they both went up to their sitting-room; and there Celia observed that Dorothea, instead of settling down with her usual diligent interest to some occupation, simply leaned her elbow on an open book and looked out of the window at the great cedar silvered with the damp. She herself had taken up the making of a toy for the curate's children, and was not going to enter on any subject too precipitately." 

The silvered cedar, the wet, languid day ahead of them, and Celia computing just how she will bring up her suspicions. Dorothea anticipates her sister and dreads the "corrosiveness of Celia's pretty carnally-minded prose." What a line!! She's right to dread it, because Celia's words are well-aimed: 

"Is anyone else coming to dine besides Mr Casaubon?"

"Not that I know of."

"I hope there is some one else. Then I shall not hear him eat his soup so." 

Could there be a better attack then to address the annoyance of hearing someone else eating? And someone to whom you may marry and have to listen to three times a day until one of you finally escapes through death? 

As I'm becoming reacquainted with Dorothea Brooke, I find her reference in the Netflix show You so hilarious. She's a character defined by her idealism, her yearning soul, so the thought of her being a costume is ridiculous. So pretentious. Perfect choice. 

Read this for the first time this morning: 

 https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/08/08/it-can-be-embarrassing-to-love-dorothea/

“ She reminded me, gently, of the value of holding my tongue when my boiling blood was instructing me not only to speak but to throw some dishes in the bargain. She was an example of equanimity that comes hard-won, one that made good behavior seem not sappy and sentimental but fed by strength and understanding.”

 I was in the breakroom with my boss and he saw I was reading Middlemarch. He said he tried to read it once, but gave up. The writing was too difficult and he wasn't interested in pushing through. I get that. It is a book that resists rushing; Eliot's sentences sometimes thorny. I'm re-reading it two pages at a time, so having to read a paragraph a few times is built-in to my experience.

I don't always want that; I don't always want to "work" when I read. The other week, someone recommended Hart Crane's poem cycle "Voyages" to me. I had to look up nearly three words for each section and read it multiple times, and even then I'm not entirely sure I understand it. She said it was "all about gay sex." I definitely missed that. Still, I enjoyed the challenge. 

To be fair, my other reading was Our Winter Monster, which I very much enjoyed for its unpretentious quality. 

The description of Sir James is hysterical. He is an oblivious bro, and Eliot cuts ignorant men like him down to size. 

He's contentedly mediocre: he has "the rare merit of knowing that his talents, even if let loose, would not set the smallest stream in the county on fire." An attractive clever wife would suit him well, could help lead his decisions. Besides, he can always put her in her "place," because, after all, he is a man, and "a man's mind--what there is of it--has always the advantage of being masculine." A man's mind may be SMALL and LIMP but its position in a male frame in a patriarchal society...firms it up, you might say. Gives it the necessary stiffness for even the most ignorant man to have dominance over intelligent women. 

 Ten-ish years later I am back on the road to Middlemarch, this time with company. 

The intervening years have brought significant changes to my life. I've gotten married, I moved out of the city, I live in a Midwestern suburb. My life is much less Dunkin Donuts and train commutes and more walking down tree-lined streets and knowing the first names of everyone that uses the little public library where I work now. I've had losses, but thankfully not many, and I have new, close friends. I have lost touch with other friends. The regret of that is sometimes a sharp pain. 

One lovely change is that my mom and I have spent the last few years reading big books over the course of a calendar year, starting with War and Peace in 2020. I have been hankering to re-read Middlemarch with her, and 2026 is the year. It's kind of a shame how little I actually can recall of the story, other than the pleasure of being in it. Dorothea and Celia, Casaubon, Lydgate and Rosamond, those characters and storylines I recall, but Mary Garth has faded, as has Ladislaw. 

Just over a week into the new year, and I am up to chapter 3. I am struck by the complexity of Eliot's writing and the depth of insight into characters and relationships. After spending last year reading David Copperfield, my thought is a resounding: Dickens could never. 

"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.