"I at least have so much to do in unravelling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe." 

Lydgate, in the vote for the hospital chaplain, felt "the hampering threadlike pressure of small social conditions, and their frustrating complexity." 

I am reminded of the young mother in Between the Acts, drifting through the library reciting poetry and talking about the menu, who, when her boy is maligned by his grandfather, is "pegged down on a chair arm, like a captive balloon, by a myriad of hair-thin ties into domesticity." These ties are resented, how can they not be? How has Farebrother not trained his female relations better, Lydgate wonders. Is Farebrother a sort of Hercules, having chosen responsibility over pleasure? A hero doomed by that choice but forever renowned afterwards for his strength and determination? 

Here are a cluster of quotes I loved from this month's reading: 

Mary believes "any hardship is better than pretending to do what one is paid for, and never really doing it." 

A stranger is considered all sorts of things, "known merely as a cluster of signs for his neighbors' false suppositions." 

"'I suppose all country towns are pretty much alike,' said Lydgate. 'But I have noticed that one always believes one's own town to be more stupid than the other. I have made up my mind to take Middlemarch as it comes, and shall be much obliged if the town will take me in the same way.'"

"'Don't you think men overrate the necessity for humoring everybody's nonsense, till they get despised by the very fools they humor?'"

"'They really look on the rest of mankind as a doomed carcass which is to nourish them for heaven.'"

Lydgate's "nature was keenly alive" to Farebrother's qualities. 

"The meditative process of shaving." 

Lydgate believes that "a woman ought to produce the effect of exquisite music." Plain women? Face with philosophy and investigate with science. Hilarious. 

Fred and Rosamond both want the best of everything without having to think about paying. 

I love their sibling banter. Fred: "A prig is a fellow who is always making you a present of his opinions." 

Who will inherit Mr. Featherstone's fortune? "Money's a good egg, and if you've got money to leave behind, lay it in a warm nest." Likely Fred, who is handsome, lively, and frivolous. Perhaps Mary Garth, plain and poor but devoted. 

Featherstone's sister Jane Waule "was accustomed to think that entire freedom from the necessity of behaving agreeably was included in the Almighty's intentions about family," which reminds me of a reel I watched yesterday. A young woman said that in Slavic culture, friction means connection, so harsh truths are spoken. Mary says something in a similar vein to Rosamond: "If one is not to go into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?" 

Rosamond "was by nature an actress of parts that entered into her physique: she even acted her own character, and so well, that she did not know it to be precisely her own." 

"Their eyes met with that peculiar meeting which is never arrived at by effort, but seems like a sudden divine clearance of haze." But Rosamond was primed for this feeling, this "falling in love," with a well-born stranger. 

 ok I'm back in. I had forgotten about Camden Farebrother, or, I suppose it is possible he didn't make quite as large an impression on me ten years ago. Perhaps now that I am closer to his age, I feel the piquancy of his character more; I no longer share with Lydgate "the usual shallowness of a young bachelor." Finished the last part of March's reading in the magnolia tree. 

 Feeling so bummed out. I don’t remember feeling like this book was such a drag the first time through. I am currently reading through Lydgate’s section in Book II and keep finding it just so remote. I lose interest quickly. I have so much to read before the weekend and it feels like plowing through sludge. I loved this book. What happened?

 February’s reading was dryer. The pages of my book are “foxed.” Am I using that correctly? Yellowing at the edges, creeping in towards the text. Still finding sparks of truth, of humor, but maybe because the month has been so busy and I read less regularly, I felt Middlemarch was the duller of media I kept returning to. 

 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.

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.

On Monday I left Middlemarch at work, so I started For the Thrill of It, the story of Leopold and Loeb. It's very good! But I went back yesterday to pick up Middlemarch, and last night returned to the painful story of Rosamond and Tertius. I only recently realized I picture the exquisite Rosamund Pike as the poisonously poised Rosamond Vincy, and it's not just the similarity in their first names. Rosamond Vincy is like Pike's character in Gone Girl: perfect at appearing the way you want to see her. "Every nerve and muscle in Rosamond was adjusted to the consciousness that she was being looked at. She was by nature an actress of parts that entered into her physique: she even acted her own character, and so well, that she did not know it to be precisely her own."

Even in tense moments, her beauty serves to distract and soothe. "As she came towards him in her drapery of transparent faintly-tinted muslin, her slim yet round figure never looked more graceful [...] her delicate neck and cheek and purely-cut lips never had more of that untarnished beauty which touches us in spring-time and infancy and all sweet freshness." She'll never directly contradict you (that would be unladylike), the only indicator that she will thwart you at every turn is a "little turning aside of [her] long neck." And she always gets her way.

Eliot's making a point about marriage: partnerships that begin with beautiful illusions based only loosely in reality end in bitterness and alienation: "Just as clearly in the miserable light she saw her own and her husband's solitude -- how they walked apart so that she was obliged to survey him." Better to be uncomfortably familiar with the faults and short-comings of your partner than to jump into a relationship that seems perfect, and that you imagine will only get better.