Two-and-a-half years after starting it, I finally finished reading Middlemarch, the mammoth novel by George Eliot (pen name of Mary Ann Evans, 1819-1880). It sat on my dresser for most of that duration, sometimes undisturbed for a month or two even though it was always readily available, until the challenge—or the guilt—of finishing a “classic” finally pushed me back to “pick it up and read” (the same conviction that Augustine silently heard before his conversion experience as he describes it in his Confessions). As I returned to the book, the quip by Mark Twain more than once swirled around my brain: “A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.”
I began reading Middlemarch as my “I’ll read this while traveling” book when I was finally able to visit Paris for the first time in May 2023. Note to myself (and you): don’t lug around a 650-page book when you travel! Instead, select one around 200 pages. (The Great Gatsby comes in at about 188 pages. Perfect.) To those of you who read books on Kindl or whatever digital machine you prefer, I cannot relate. I need the feel of material reality when I read, the feel of paper and the smell of a book (even the musty ones—maybe especially the musty ones).
Perhaps what I like best, though, is the control I have with a book with paper pages versus one that boasts of its “digitality.” When I read, I thumb my nose at the social expectation to be accessible 24/7. I give myself the luxury of reading slowly, thinking deeply, and making connections mentally. O.K., I confess that I also need to turn off the volume on my I-phone and stick it in my dresser amongst my socks so I cannot hear the buzzing when a text is sent to me, because my willpower is only as strong as the absence of my temptations.
Augustine asserted that we mere mortals are no match for temptation—he listed avarice, ambition, and lust as the big three—and writers during the Enlightenment, even with its celebration of the rational, knew that our logic and our willpower could not overcome temptation. We need a hedge, we need a double hedge, to avoid being controlled by our impulses and vices, which is why the Founding Fathers, those celebrators of Enlightenment thinking, admitted the inadequacies of the rational mind when they created a Constitution for these United States that incorporated a system of checks and balances. Our system of government was never meant to do things quickly; it was meant to do things deliberately, cooperatively, and well.
Some people praise Middlemarch as the best novel ever written in the English language. I don’t. The plot takes so terribly long to unfold, and when it does it doesn’t startle or pull you in. (Although, to be fair, perhaps it had more of a pull in the 1870s when it was first published.)
I do, however, feel that it is a worthwhile read: it is impressive how the author created an entire English village with a large cast of memorable characters, spanning the breadth of social classes as well as human virtues and vices. Two characters, Edward Casaubon, the sour clergyman and inept scholar, and his much-younger, kind-yet-naïve wife, Dorothea, are two such examples.
Why did I keep plugging away at the book, though? I think it came down to the physical challenge of deciphering the extremely dense and archaic writing style (double negatives abound), along with the intellectual joy of eventually comprehending the subtle sociological and psychological insights that Eliot/Evans reveals, as exemplified here:
“But indefinite visions of ambition are weak against the ease of doing what is habitual or beguilingly agreeable; and we all know the difficulty of carrying out a resolve when we secretly long that it may turn out to be unnecessary.”
We long to do yet are relieved not to have to. Truer words were never spoken regarding the actions of a writer when faced with the task of writing, of needing to get thoughts down on paper, yet finding ways to justify the necessity of spending one’s time and energy doing almost anything else. Jesus himself informs us that “the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Matthew 26:41 ESV).
I also kept reading because the writer’s thoughts are, at times, incredibly uplifting, especially when describing the kindness of Dorothea and her desire to help make the world a little better place, whether through patient words spoken during tense conversations or by means of a plan to build affordable housing for the poor. At the conclusion of the novel, the narrator has this to say about Dorothea while providing encouragement for those reading the book to fight the good fight:
Certainly, those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed results of a young and noble impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion . . . Her finely-touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible . . . 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.
In this way, Middlemarch did for me, the reader, what a daily reading of the Bible does: it reminds us that virtue is still a good in itself even when it seems overpowered by those who are “vicious” (as in its original meaning of “being filled with vices”), that God is still in control even when we do not have eyes to see Him, and that there are still people out there who trust that compassion is still superior to money, power, selfishness, and greed.
Christian Overtones 