It’s hard not to think of these Rome chapters as Eliot’s meditation on her own biggest fears about her work, her place in literary history, and the relation of the great to the mediocre, the major to the minor.
Thanks for a truly insightful account of these chapters. The only thing I would add, from the point of view of psychology, and I don't know what to make of it, is how very important anger is in Chapter 20, where Dorothea and Casaubon get in their fight. It isn't only, as you say, that Dorothea is eager and ardent (unless we take ardent in its literal sense of burning) and then disappointed. She is surprised to find herself angry ("...her mind was continually sliding into inward fits of anger...") even before they have their fight, simply being in Rome. And then, after she speaks of the notes becoming a book, "Casaubon's face had a quick, angry flush upon it." Finally, we are told they are both shocked "...that each should have betrayed anger toward the other." Anger is an emotion that can accompany real insight, according to some philosophers. It may also be an index of their intense involvement with one another, despite Casaubon's prim physical distancing you describe so well.
That is a very interesting thing to think about, Eliot's fear about her own work. It does throw more sympathy on Casaubon to see it that way. I like how Eliot lets Will say horrible things about Casaubon because it satisfies an itch, for the reader too. It is wearying to be so broad-minded and sympathetic all the time. Not that I am! But I think the narrator is. Which is one of the great things about the book, to have both kinds of commentary going on.
I am glad to see Dorothea again, but I do find the descriptions of her still a little annoying. All the perfect beauty and quivering young sensitivity. I almost feel more sorry for Casaubon in a way! I can't believe I'm saying that .. but he is set in his ways and while he may get some unpleasant shocks he is not going to change course or suddenly become a different guy. Exploring his character has its limits though if anyone can make him multi-faceted it's Eliot.
Will fell very quickly in love ... like everyone else in this book!
This is such a thoughtful response from Mona. Thank you.
I was reminded of the glacial sense of history inscribed in the landscapes of Canada in Alice Munro's stories. Some lakes look like claw scratches in the rocks. In Rome, among ruins of a great civilization, we see a quick marriage's facade already crack. Vanitas. We see this in the portraits, one of Casaubon as a dead man, and one of the living Dorothea, which her new husband shuns.
I'm with you all in thinking that the bedroom anger is a deliberate hint by Eliot of sexual frustration, at least on Dorothea's part.
Meanwhile, I just want to draw attention to Chapter 17, I love the description of Rev Farebrother's 'den'...'nothing but pickled vermin and drawers full of bluebottles and moths with no carpet on the floor.' In the early 1830s, it was the Reverend Farebrothers everywhere who were pioneering scientific studies of botany and anatomy that within the next fifty years would revolutionise our understanding of science and evolution. Charles Darwin had just finished his degree at Cambridge and was setting off on the Beagle. For many of these proto-scientists, their studies would come at the cost of their beliefs - or leave them torn and in denial (such as Philip Gosse, as portrayed in Father and Son by his son Edmund.)
Finally, wince with me when Lydgate says, about moving out of London to the country, 'one makes less bad blood, and can follow one's own course more quietly.' He is about to find out that one is never safe from the dangers of picking the wrong side!
Jul 29, 2023·edited Jul 29, 2023Liked by Ann Kjellberg
Oh, boy. Chapter 20 is the one I can't shake, the one that left me with such pleasure, and such confused sadness, and also recognition. It all gave me a weird afterburn of agitated feeling. I've never read anything close to what Eliot captures.
A real-time portrait of someone losing their faith. A devout woman, devout in the best way, to actual ideals about how to live, how to be a good and caring and responsible sort of person, and she's been dropped into the Eternal City, wandering the past. I was noticing (am I remotely right?) how time moved differently in the sections of this Book. The way Lydgate's private thoughts linger on potential futures, and yet when he's manhandled into place among Middlemarch's fuddy-duddy elders, their vanities and comments seem to overtake everything. The book slows to the pace of a town hall meeting. I feel his pain. He's trapped in a civic duty amid the most petite, petty concerns, at least to him. And then time moves in a different way, in Rome, or seems to. The way it does when we wander an art gallery, mind elsewhere, feeling alive and removed from life at the same time. I so enjoy the placement of Dorothea via Naumann -- he's trying to catch her among the stilled lives, statues of long-gone women, people frozen in time. But when she comes to life again, the writing quickens.
You know, I think there's an intensity of feeling to Dorothea's loss of faith that replaces the love scene. It has the granular detail of a love scene. It moves from intimate realization to another. But since faith to George Eliot has always seemed to be up there on par with romantic love, so much more is being lost by losing faith in the man -- the life -- she placed her hopes in. Man, the way Casaubon couldn't reach back to locate any youthful enthusiasms for seeing Rome again for the first time, how Dorothea wavered between feeling underseen and blaming herself, as if she'd failed to read his mysterious needs. Old and young is right. And when the chapter closes, and the words of Book III appear -- "Waiting For Death" -- I felt such a jolt. Was I supposed to laugh? I did, and winced too. It was Ladislaw who by showing up offered some hope, some little window of light visible in the tunnel, but somehow I know life is going to be very changed when everyone sails back home to Lowick.
If I were back in college, I'd drum up a paper about the sex scene being replaced with the scene of vast disillusionment. Or about hatred and mistrust of the body, from the man with tiny legs.
Great question. Although Lydgate is kind and caring to his patients and helps them in concrete ways (cf. D’s charitable projects), my sense is Dorothea is more in sync psychologically/spiritually with Ladislaw. That could also just be me being influenced by what I already know. But it is touching how her initial reactions are always to show kindness and put people at ease.
Casaubon’s feelings toward Will: “There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire:it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.” Casaubon does have feelings but they’re hidden so deeply there’s no spark, just sadness and a simmering anger.
There are so many good and right things said about this latest reading. There is no way I could have imagined them all without Mona's in-depth, insightful commentary and the comments that followed (and I have read all of them). Thanks to everyone, especially Mona, for taking the time to contribute intellectually to this thread, which I have greatly enjoyed and appreciated. A posthumous thanks, too, to Mary Ann Evans, who clearly had more in mind than "cashing in" when she wrote Middlemarch.
I must confess that I found many passages in this past week's readings to be troubling and difficult to follow. Were it not for knowing of the light to eventually be cast upon them at week end by the learned folks assembled here, I would have cast this book aside and never lifted the cover again. I loved Dickinson's brief sentences gorged with meaning, whereas Elliot spins paragraph after paragraph from every direction, page after page probing choice situations, which at times I found cumbersome and tiring. I am also starting to find the continuous references to classic literature at the beginning of each chapter, and historical references peppered throughout the text, as a bit "over the top" in my mind. In some instances the inferences and citations work, but many times, I was scratching my head and consulting notes to the text before moving on. Perhaps in Victorian times people had more time to ponder "why?" or the references were more in the popular domain than they are now. Or is Eliot trying just a bit too hard to impress us? Perhaps all of these things.
Troubling, too, because I never thought as deeply about some of these subjects as Eliot has done. I love Rome and have spent months there. It never occurred to me that gallery after gallery in the Vatican was anything but amazing, but the observations of their sameness are not undeserved. Troubling that, yes, we all make self interested choices and blind ourselves to our less-than-noble rationales. Troubling because we all tend to look with less than a gracious eye at times upon our own benefactors, whether they be parents, friends, bosses and yes, even the government with so many folks collecting with one hand and critical of the actions that don't benefit us personally on the other.
By no means am I another Will Ladislaw making dispersions upon Mr Casaubon, muddying what is clearly a masterpiece work. Nor would I expect anyone to be as impressionable as young Dorothea, allowing my observations to colour their own opinions in a negative way. I wouldn't even bring this up if the scenes and actions committed to the paper didn't work and form an image in my mind that we all can relate to, and the work products we are experiencing weren't worth some small thoughtful contribution and reaction on my part, as well.
Perhaps it is unwise to speak one's mind in any critical way here about an author, especially when I don't have a deep appreciation for the times and circumstances during which the work was written. But maybe I am the elephant in the room and a speaker for our times, too, an aspiring writer who has come to believe, in much the same way Dorothea is starting to worry about her new husband's possible contributions (or lack of them), that all of our work eventually becomes "soil" for new and better artwork to feed upon, like our own ashes that eventually form the soil which produces the food consumed by the pregnant mother and her fetus, all marching towards the day when our galaxy is sucked into a black hole and our race catapults to another sphere or is vanquished.
I also offer these remarks as further elaboration of remarks made previously about my appreciation for being led into this novel by Ms. Simpson, a work I would have tossed to the side after the last 50 pages. I am thankful for being spoon-fed and babied along to make it to the eventual finish line.
And now I am starting to mimic Eliot, going on and on looking at a point from every which way. So let me say I am troubled by reading my own comments, too. It is time to stop, hit "post" and walk away. Nothing produced by mankind is perfect and never will be. There is a big crack running through it all. Emerson said it so well.
I am trying to catch up with everybody!!! Visualize woman hunched over reading w great earnestness, a la someone in a spin class (only took one in my life so have no idea what I’m talking about there). I am liking; I am admiring; I am curious and determined to read the whole of Middlemarch - these are my issues, female identity/societal expectations- but, so far, I am not loving Middlemarch. At about p. 157. Still reading.
This beautiful write-up reminds me that Eliot does such a deft job of showing the link between Dorothea's hero workshop/self-abnegation and the early loss of her mother. Just as Dorothea isn't conscious of this wounding, the reader might only be barely conscious of it.
Another question I have is about the Roman setting. What use is Eliot making of Rome in these chapters? There is one great paragraph about Dorothea's response to Rome that would be worth discussing. It might seem that her response to Rome is unrelated to her changing feelings about her marriage, more a matter of her Quakerish predisposition, but towards the end of this paragraph we realize that she is projecting her feelings of disappointment onto the martyrdoms, etc. frescoed around her. No wonder they affect her so powerfully. Paradoxically, she seems to have a more authentic, vital response to Rome, though a sorrowful one, than a great critic like Ruskin whoever, who projects his energy outward. Similarly, when Naumann discovers her, he finds her more alive than the Ariadne she dreamily ignores.
There are so many good and right things said about this latest reading. There is no way I could have imagined them all without Mona's in-depth, insightful commentary and the comments that followed (and I have read all of them). Thanks to everyone, especially Mona, for taking the time to contribute intellectually to this thread, which I have greatly enjoyed and appreciated. A posthumous thanks, too, to Mary Ann Evans, who clearly had more in mind than "cashing in" when she wrote Middlemarch.
I must confess that I found many passages in this past week's readings to be troubling and difficult to follow. Were it not for knowing of the light to eventually be cast upon them at week end by the learned folks assembled here, I would have cast this book aside and never lifted the cover again. I loved Dickinson's brief sentences gorged with meaning, whereas Elliot spins paragraph after paragraph from every direction, page after page probing choice situations, which at times I found cumbersome and tiring. I am also starting to find the continuous references to classic literature at the beginning of each chapter, and historical references peppered throughout the text, as a bit "over the top" in my mind. In some instances the inferences and citations work, but many times, I was scratching my head and consulting notes to the text before moving on. Perhaps in Victorian times people had more time to ponder "why?" or the references were more in the popular domain than they are now. Or is Eliot trying just a bit too hard to impress us? Perhaps all of these things.
Troubling, too, because I never thought as deeply about some of these subjects as Eliot has done. I love Rome and have spent months there. It never occurred to me that gallery after gallery in the Vatican was anything but amazing, but the observations of their sameness are not undeserved. Troubling that, yes, we all make self interested choices and blind ourselves to our less-than-noble rationales. Troubling because we all tend to look with less than a gracious eye at times upon our own benefactors, whether they be parents, friends, bosses and yes, even the government with so many folks collecting with one hand and critical of the actions that don't benefit us personally on the other.
By no means am I another Will Ladislaw making dispersions upon Mr Casaubon, muddying what is clearly a masterpiece work. Nor would I expect anyone to be as impressionable as young Dorothea, allowing my observations to colour their own opinions in a negative way. I wouldn't even bring this up if the scenes and actions committed to the paper didn't work and form an image in my mind that we all can relate to, and the work products we are experiencing weren't worth some small thoughtful contribution and reaction on my part, as well.
Perhaps it is unwise to speak one's mind in any critical way here about an author, especially when I don't have a deep appreciation for the times and circumstances during which the work was written. But maybe I am the elephant in the room and a speaker for our times, too, an aspiring writer who has come to believe, in much the same way Dorothea is starting to worry about her new husband's possible contributions (or lack of them), that all of our work eventually becomes "soil" for new and better artwork to feed upon, like our own ashes that eventually form the soil which produces the food consumed by the pregnant mother and her fetus, all marching towards the day when our galaxy is sucked into a black hole and our race catapults to another sphere or is vanquished.
I also offer these remarks as further elaboration of remarks made previously about my appreciation for being led into this novel by Ms. Simpson, a work I would have tossed to the side after the last 50 pages. I am thankful for being spoon-fed and babied along to make it to the eventual finish line.
And now I am starting to mimic Eliot, going on and on looking at a point from every which way. So let me say I am troubled by reading my own comments, too. It is time to stop, hit "post" and walk away. Nothing produced by mankind is perfect and never will be. There is a big crack running through it all. Emerson said it so well.
I've always thought perhaps something undefined happened: a fumble, mistakes, perhaps even mutual humiliation.
I hope it will begin to speak to you.
Thanks for a truly insightful account of these chapters. The only thing I would add, from the point of view of psychology, and I don't know what to make of it, is how very important anger is in Chapter 20, where Dorothea and Casaubon get in their fight. It isn't only, as you say, that Dorothea is eager and ardent (unless we take ardent in its literal sense of burning) and then disappointed. She is surprised to find herself angry ("...her mind was continually sliding into inward fits of anger...") even before they have their fight, simply being in Rome. And then, after she speaks of the notes becoming a book, "Casaubon's face had a quick, angry flush upon it." Finally, we are told they are both shocked "...that each should have betrayed anger toward the other." Anger is an emotion that can accompany real insight, according to some philosophers. It may also be an index of their intense involvement with one another, despite Casaubon's prim physical distancing you describe so well.
That is a very interesting thing to think about, Eliot's fear about her own work. It does throw more sympathy on Casaubon to see it that way. I like how Eliot lets Will say horrible things about Casaubon because it satisfies an itch, for the reader too. It is wearying to be so broad-minded and sympathetic all the time. Not that I am! But I think the narrator is. Which is one of the great things about the book, to have both kinds of commentary going on.
I am glad to see Dorothea again, but I do find the descriptions of her still a little annoying. All the perfect beauty and quivering young sensitivity. I almost feel more sorry for Casaubon in a way! I can't believe I'm saying that .. but he is set in his ways and while he may get some unpleasant shocks he is not going to change course or suddenly become a different guy. Exploring his character has its limits though if anyone can make him multi-faceted it's Eliot.
Will fell very quickly in love ... like everyone else in this book!
This is such a thoughtful response from Mona. Thank you.
I was reminded of the glacial sense of history inscribed in the landscapes of Canada in Alice Munro's stories. Some lakes look like claw scratches in the rocks. In Rome, among ruins of a great civilization, we see a quick marriage's facade already crack. Vanitas. We see this in the portraits, one of Casaubon as a dead man, and one of the living Dorothea, which her new husband shuns.
I'm with you all in thinking that the bedroom anger is a deliberate hint by Eliot of sexual frustration, at least on Dorothea's part.
Meanwhile, I just want to draw attention to Chapter 17, I love the description of Rev Farebrother's 'den'...'nothing but pickled vermin and drawers full of bluebottles and moths with no carpet on the floor.' In the early 1830s, it was the Reverend Farebrothers everywhere who were pioneering scientific studies of botany and anatomy that within the next fifty years would revolutionise our understanding of science and evolution. Charles Darwin had just finished his degree at Cambridge and was setting off on the Beagle. For many of these proto-scientists, their studies would come at the cost of their beliefs - or leave them torn and in denial (such as Philip Gosse, as portrayed in Father and Son by his son Edmund.)
Finally, wince with me when Lydgate says, about moving out of London to the country, 'one makes less bad blood, and can follow one's own course more quietly.' He is about to find out that one is never safe from the dangers of picking the wrong side!
Oh, boy. Chapter 20 is the one I can't shake, the one that left me with such pleasure, and such confused sadness, and also recognition. It all gave me a weird afterburn of agitated feeling. I've never read anything close to what Eliot captures.
A real-time portrait of someone losing their faith. A devout woman, devout in the best way, to actual ideals about how to live, how to be a good and caring and responsible sort of person, and she's been dropped into the Eternal City, wandering the past. I was noticing (am I remotely right?) how time moved differently in the sections of this Book. The way Lydgate's private thoughts linger on potential futures, and yet when he's manhandled into place among Middlemarch's fuddy-duddy elders, their vanities and comments seem to overtake everything. The book slows to the pace of a town hall meeting. I feel his pain. He's trapped in a civic duty amid the most petite, petty concerns, at least to him. And then time moves in a different way, in Rome, or seems to. The way it does when we wander an art gallery, mind elsewhere, feeling alive and removed from life at the same time. I so enjoy the placement of Dorothea via Naumann -- he's trying to catch her among the stilled lives, statues of long-gone women, people frozen in time. But when she comes to life again, the writing quickens.
You know, I think there's an intensity of feeling to Dorothea's loss of faith that replaces the love scene. It has the granular detail of a love scene. It moves from intimate realization to another. But since faith to George Eliot has always seemed to be up there on par with romantic love, so much more is being lost by losing faith in the man -- the life -- she placed her hopes in. Man, the way Casaubon couldn't reach back to locate any youthful enthusiasms for seeing Rome again for the first time, how Dorothea wavered between feeling underseen and blaming herself, as if she'd failed to read his mysterious needs. Old and young is right. And when the chapter closes, and the words of Book III appear -- "Waiting For Death" -- I felt such a jolt. Was I supposed to laugh? I did, and winced too. It was Ladislaw who by showing up offered some hope, some little window of light visible in the tunnel, but somehow I know life is going to be very changed when everyone sails back home to Lowick.
If I were back in college, I'd drum up a paper about the sex scene being replaced with the scene of vast disillusionment. Or about hatred and mistrust of the body, from the man with tiny legs.
Great question. Although Lydgate is kind and caring to his patients and helps them in concrete ways (cf. D’s charitable projects), my sense is Dorothea is more in sync psychologically/spiritually with Ladislaw. That could also just be me being influenced by what I already know. But it is touching how her initial reactions are always to show kindness and put people at ease.
Thanks for the reminder! Fred and Mary? Pretty darn slow that's true. I feel like Eliot maybe put a lot of herself in Mary.
Casaubon’s feelings toward Will: “There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire:it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.” Casaubon does have feelings but they’re hidden so deeply there’s no spark, just sadness and a simmering anger.
There are so many good and right things said about this latest reading. There is no way I could have imagined them all without Mona's in-depth, insightful commentary and the comments that followed (and I have read all of them). Thanks to everyone, especially Mona, for taking the time to contribute intellectually to this thread, which I have greatly enjoyed and appreciated. A posthumous thanks, too, to Mary Ann Evans, who clearly had more in mind than "cashing in" when she wrote Middlemarch.
I must confess that I found many passages in this past week's readings to be troubling and difficult to follow. Were it not for knowing of the light to eventually be cast upon them at week end by the learned folks assembled here, I would have cast this book aside and never lifted the cover again. I loved Dickinson's brief sentences gorged with meaning, whereas Elliot spins paragraph after paragraph from every direction, page after page probing choice situations, which at times I found cumbersome and tiring. I am also starting to find the continuous references to classic literature at the beginning of each chapter, and historical references peppered throughout the text, as a bit "over the top" in my mind. In some instances the inferences and citations work, but many times, I was scratching my head and consulting notes to the text before moving on. Perhaps in Victorian times people had more time to ponder "why?" or the references were more in the popular domain than they are now. Or is Eliot trying just a bit too hard to impress us? Perhaps all of these things.
Troubling, too, because I never thought as deeply about some of these subjects as Eliot has done. I love Rome and have spent months there. It never occurred to me that gallery after gallery in the Vatican was anything but amazing, but the observations of their sameness are not undeserved. Troubling that, yes, we all make self interested choices and blind ourselves to our less-than-noble rationales. Troubling because we all tend to look with less than a gracious eye at times upon our own benefactors, whether they be parents, friends, bosses and yes, even the government with so many folks collecting with one hand and critical of the actions that don't benefit us personally on the other.
By no means am I another Will Ladislaw making dispersions upon Mr Casaubon, muddying what is clearly a masterpiece work. Nor would I expect anyone to be as impressionable as young Dorothea, allowing my observations to colour their own opinions in a negative way. I wouldn't even bring this up if the scenes and actions committed to the paper didn't work and form an image in my mind that we all can relate to, and the work products we are experiencing weren't worth some small thoughtful contribution and reaction on my part, as well.
Perhaps it is unwise to speak one's mind in any critical way here about an author, especially when I don't have a deep appreciation for the times and circumstances during which the work was written. But maybe I am the elephant in the room and a speaker for our times, too, an aspiring writer who has come to believe, in much the same way Dorothea is starting to worry about her new husband's possible contributions (or lack of them), that all of our work eventually becomes "soil" for new and better artwork to feed upon, like our own ashes that eventually form the soil which produces the food consumed by the pregnant mother and her fetus, all marching towards the day when our galaxy is sucked into a black hole and our race catapults to another sphere or is vanquished.
I also offer these remarks as further elaboration of remarks made previously about my appreciation for being led into this novel by Ms. Simpson, a work I would have tossed to the side after the last 50 pages. I am thankful for being spoon-fed and babied along to make it to the eventual finish line.
And now I am starting to mimic Eliot, going on and on looking at a point from every which way. So let me say I am troubled by reading my own comments, too. It is time to stop, hit "post" and walk away. Nothing produced by mankind is perfect and never will be. There is a big crack running through it all. Emerson said it so well.
Read you all next week!
I am trying to catch up with everybody!!! Visualize woman hunched over reading w great earnestness, a la someone in a spin class (only took one in my life so have no idea what I’m talking about there). I am liking; I am admiring; I am curious and determined to read the whole of Middlemarch - these are my issues, female identity/societal expectations- but, so far, I am not loving Middlemarch. At about p. 157. Still reading.
This beautiful write-up reminds me that Eliot does such a deft job of showing the link between Dorothea's hero workshop/self-abnegation and the early loss of her mother. Just as Dorothea isn't conscious of this wounding, the reader might only be barely conscious of it.
Another question I have is about the Roman setting. What use is Eliot making of Rome in these chapters? There is one great paragraph about Dorothea's response to Rome that would be worth discussing. It might seem that her response to Rome is unrelated to her changing feelings about her marriage, more a matter of her Quakerish predisposition, but towards the end of this paragraph we realize that she is projecting her feelings of disappointment onto the martyrdoms, etc. frescoed around her. No wonder they affect her so powerfully. Paradoxically, she seems to have a more authentic, vital response to Rome, though a sorrowful one, than a great critic like Ruskin whoever, who projects his energy outward. Similarly, when Naumann discovers her, he finds her more alive than the Ariadne she dreamily ignores.
There are so many good and right things said about this latest reading. There is no way I could have imagined them all without Mona's in-depth, insightful commentary and the comments that followed (and I have read all of them). Thanks to everyone, especially Mona, for taking the time to contribute intellectually to this thread, which I have greatly enjoyed and appreciated. A posthumous thanks, too, to Mary Ann Evans, who clearly had more in mind than "cashing in" when she wrote Middlemarch.
I must confess that I found many passages in this past week's readings to be troubling and difficult to follow. Were it not for knowing of the light to eventually be cast upon them at week end by the learned folks assembled here, I would have cast this book aside and never lifted the cover again. I loved Dickinson's brief sentences gorged with meaning, whereas Elliot spins paragraph after paragraph from every direction, page after page probing choice situations, which at times I found cumbersome and tiring. I am also starting to find the continuous references to classic literature at the beginning of each chapter, and historical references peppered throughout the text, as a bit "over the top" in my mind. In some instances the inferences and citations work, but many times, I was scratching my head and consulting notes to the text before moving on. Perhaps in Victorian times people had more time to ponder "why?" or the references were more in the popular domain than they are now. Or is Eliot trying just a bit too hard to impress us? Perhaps all of these things.
Troubling, too, because I never thought as deeply about some of these subjects as Eliot has done. I love Rome and have spent months there. It never occurred to me that gallery after gallery in the Vatican was anything but amazing, but the observations of their sameness are not undeserved. Troubling that, yes, we all make self interested choices and blind ourselves to our less-than-noble rationales. Troubling because we all tend to look with less than a gracious eye at times upon our own benefactors, whether they be parents, friends, bosses and yes, even the government with so many folks collecting with one hand and critical of the actions that don't benefit us personally on the other.
By no means am I another Will Ladislaw making dispersions upon Mr Casaubon, muddying what is clearly a masterpiece work. Nor would I expect anyone to be as impressionable as young Dorothea, allowing my observations to colour their own opinions in a negative way. I wouldn't even bring this up if the scenes and actions committed to the paper didn't work and form an image in my mind that we all can relate to, and the work products we are experiencing weren't worth some small thoughtful contribution and reaction on my part, as well.
Perhaps it is unwise to speak one's mind in any critical way here about an author, especially when I don't have a deep appreciation for the times and circumstances during which the work was written. But maybe I am the elephant in the room and a speaker for our times, too, an aspiring writer who has come to believe, in much the same way Dorothea is starting to worry about her new husband's possible contributions (or lack of them), that all of our work eventually becomes "soil" for new and better artwork to feed upon, like our own ashes that eventually form the soil which produces the food consumed by the pregnant mother and her fetus, all marching towards the day when our galaxy is sucked into a black hole and our race catapults to another sphere or is vanquished.
I also offer these remarks as further elaboration of remarks made previously about my appreciation for being led into this novel by Ms. Simpson, a work I would have tossed to the side after the last 50 pages. I am thankful for being spoon-fed and babied along to make it to the eventual finish line.
And now I am starting to mimic Eliot, going on and on looking at a point from every which way. So let me say I am troubled by reading my own comments, too. It is time to stop, hit "post" and walk away. Nothing produced by mankind is perfect and never will be. There is a big crack running through it all. Emerson said it so well.
Read you all next week!