Sunday, May 4, 2025
At long last, I tackled and finished George Eliot’s “Middlemarch," switching between audio and paperback over the past several months. What a canvas. Such intelligence. And the prose. The 750 pages are rich with memorable phrases that get inside her characters — one’s “self-cherishing anxiety”; another’s “motiveless levity”; the “reciprocal tolerance” that two have for each other — and whole paragraphs, like this novel-closing gem, that are indestructible, rhythmic, and wise:
Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.