Reading Middlemarch – Through Book Two

Middlemarch must be the longest book I’ve started (Goblet of Fire and The Book of Basketball are the longest finished). And I am not being forced to read it. No longer am I slave to syllabi’s books, so I chose Middlemarch as the first book to read during winter break, which sounds better than “life” (which is more precisely the thing I’m in now, but that sort of melancholic talk is for another place). Over ten hours and only 200 pages in, I’m trudging but thoroughly enjoying the novel. I’ve been reading a bunch of women lately but not Victorian women–though this reads more like Faulkner than the women because of his tastes.

Really quickly, the novel’s subtitle is “A Study of Provincial Life,” and I think the adjective can be removed–not only because right now I think life is life, regardless of the micro-context, but because this woman was such a keen observer that the text is accurate, to my awareness. The text follows a few characters but ventures deep (sometimes like ten, small-print [I'm talking font size 8 or something] pages deep] into side characters’ lives and stories. With great focus Eliot does this.

Here are a few quotes to end this, and hopefully I’ll return here when I’m further in or done with the novel. But Lindsey told me that I don’t have to finish the book and that maybe I won’t. And she bought me the Harry Potter box-set for graduation–temptress. However, determination will endure…for all seven-hundred-and-ninety-five, bad-eyesight-inducing pages.

“Any one watching keenly the stealthy convergence of human lots, sees a slow preparation of effects from one life on another, which tells like a calculated irony on the indifference or the frozen stare with which we look at our unintroduced neighbour. Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personæ folded in her hand.”

“Each lived in a world of which the other knew nothing.”

“The element of tragedy which lies in the fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.”

All three are from the narrator, who I furtively imagine as Miss Mary Anne Evans (or George Eliot) as the conduit through which I receive this story.