Dorothea’s impetuous generosity, which would have leaped at once to the vindication of Lydgate from the suspicion of having accepted money as a bribe, underwent a melancholy check when she came to consider all the circumstances of the case by the light of Mr. Farebrother’s experience.
“It is a delicate matter to touch,” he said. “How can we begin to inquire into it? It must be either publicly by setting the magistrate and coroner to work, or privately by questioning Lydgate. As to the first proceeding there is no solid ground to go upon, else Hawley would have adopted it; and as to opening the subject with Lydgate, I confess I should shrink from it. He would probably take it as a deadly insult. I have more than once experienced the difficulty of speaking to him on personal matters. And — one should know the truth about his conduct beforehand, to feel very confident of a good result.”
“I feel convinced that his conduct has not been guilty: I believe that people are almost always better than their neighbors think they are,” said Dorothea. Some of her intensest experience in the last two years had set her mind strongly in opposition to any unfavorable construction of others; and for the first time she felt rather discontented with Mr. Farebrother. She disliked this cautious weighing of consequences, instead of an ardent faith in efforts of justice and mercy, which would conquer by their emotional force.
As Dorothea goes on to say, “What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?” In fact Lydgate, though guilty of many things (the kinds of things that everyone else in Middlemarch is guilty of), is innocent of what he is suspected of doing. But he cannot prove it, and in Middlemarch one is always guilty except when proved innocent beyond a shadow of a doubt.
So much of our attention in this book goes to its flawed but lovable chief characters that readers tend to neglect Eliot’s slashing portrait of Middlemarch society as a whole: the town’s people are malicious gossips at best, vicious destroyers of reputations at worst. Even the eminently decent Farebrother turns to “this cautious weighing of consequences” in preference to defending those that Middlemarch has canceled. (He knows the rule: Defend the canceled, get canceled yourself.) By the end of the book, all of the major characters have left Middlemarch, even Fred and Mary, who live well outside of town at Stone Court. It is the nature of Middlemarch to drive all the interesting people away.
As I remarked, my current work concerns the development of folk horror, and in that process, the whole Margaret Murray phenomenon is critical. Crucially, the theory (which endured powerfully into the 1970s) allowed modern writers to imagine ancient pagan cults surviving today, and entrapping unwary urban visitors. Whatever he actually intended, Robert Kirk offered a superb manual for such literature, with his entrancing portrait of those fairies in the adjacent realm, into which modern people could easily slip. Adding witchcraft to the mix created a very tempting brew indeed. Kirk offered later writers almost a pre-written script.
I’m so glad Philip is turning to this — it’s something he’s thought about for years and years. It will be interesting to see how his work compares to that of Francis Young.
Hi.
PSA: I will post nothing further about AGI/machine learning. I will read nothing further on the topic (and am purging my RSS feed accordingly). I have other and better things on my mind and heart.
Finished reading: Middlemarch by George Eliot — for maybe the twelfth time. As I grow older and older, it grows greater and greater. 📚
Ring Rhyme in Latin - by Adam Roberts: “In terra Mordoris tenebrosissima” is especially fine.
Finished reading: The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America by Douglas Brinkley. One-third of this massive book concerns the personal and political life of TR; one-third concerns his astonishing achievements in the conservation of the American landscape and its creatures; and one-third describes his killing of animals, thousands of animals. It often seems that TR wanted to protect the wildlife of American from everyone except him and his friends, who would be free to slaughter indiscriminately. His bloodlust was a kind of mania, and Brinkley can do nothing (who could?) to explain how it co-existed with his lifelong commitment to protect wild animals and their environments. 📚
Birds should be saved because of utilitarian reasons; and, moreover, they should be saved because of reasons unconnected with any return in dollars and cents. A grove of giant redwoods or sequoias should be kept just as we keep a great and beautiful cathedral. The extermination of the passenger-pigeon meant that mankind was just so much poorer; exactly as in the case of the destruction of the cathedral at Rheims. And to lose the chance to see frigate-birds soaring in circles above the storm, or a file of pelicans winging their way homeward across the crimson afterglow of the sunset, or a myriad terns flashing in the bright light of midday as they hover in a shifting maze above the beach — why, the loss is like the loss of a gallery of the masterpieces of the artists of old time.
Roosevelt’s love of birds led him to create the first national wildlife refuge at Florida’s Pelican Island.
I have mixed feelings about the last decade of Beatles remixes, but this new version of Rubber Soul is AMAZING, especially on a good pair of headphones. 🎵
[Sarah L.] Kaufman has a favorite sentence that serves as a touchstone. It’s the last sentence of “The Great Gatsby,” and I bet you do know this one: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” She grows eloquent on the magic of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s diction. “You might feel his verbs in your body, so delicately you’re not quite aware of it,” she says. “The repeated B sound — beat, boats, borne back — is percussive. The physical resonance of the verb beat may echo internally in many ways, as you feel a soft drumbeat, as your heart beats. Reading ‘borne back’ may light a brief, indistinct flickering inside, a sense of how your own consciousness can whoosh backward in time.”
Apart from the fact that I have never understood what Fitzgerald is trying to say here — isn’t the whole point of the book not that Gatsby is doomed to return to the past but that he can’t? — I think that “beat” and “borne” lack visual concreteness. Shouldn’t it be “paddle”?
What a peculiar response. Isn’t it the case that a person paddling vigorously, the person working desperately against a strong current, is fairly beating the water with his oars? And such a person is Nick Carraway, the character who utters these words. The sentence isn’t about Gatsby at all — Gatsby is dead — but about Nick, who very badly wants to put the whole Gatsby-and-Daisy era of his life safely into history, but no matter how energetically he beats the waters, he cannot; he is ever borne back into his painful past.