Lately I’ve been getting a little irritated at Facebook boastings about all the great and lofty things that people are accomplishing in these COVID days. The ten best lists that highlight a person’s erudition or sophistication, for one thing. So announcing that I have been using this time of self isolation to finally tackle the greatest novel in English risks sounding like a boast. If so, I humbly apologize.
In mid March, when my own self isolation began, I took my copy of Middlemarch down from the mantel where it had stood for several years next to Rebecca Mead’s personal memoir, My Life In Middlemarch. I had not yet read either of these books at the time I originally placed them side by side, in between retro bookends; I just liked the idea of displaying a book about a book next to the book it’s about.
Now, nearly two months into the global pandemic, I have news to report: I am about two thirds of the way through Middlemarch. That is, I’m at around page 525 of 849. And yes, (spoiler alert!) that mean old SOB has finally died.
I am not usually a slow reader. But my progress through Middlemarch has been leisurely in the extreme. A chapter or two per night, at bedtime. Another chapter or two if I wake in the night. Is this slow pace because of the difficulty of focusing in a world turned upside down? Possibly. Is it that the novel is not exactly a page-turner? Maybe. Is it that I have been irretrievably corrupted by the lightning-fast entertainment modes of the 21st century? Very likely.
But it’s been a pleasure to go slowly, too. I’ve also picked up Mead’s book and browsed in it for nuggets about Eliot’s life. How deeply satisfying to contemplate the fact that this highly intelligent woman who was not at all conventionally attractive was able to find true and lasting love in middle age with a man who believed in and supported her artistic gifts. Virginia Woolf has described Middlemarch as the first novel for grownups. Maybe that explains why I have never gotten beyond the first few pages until now, in my mid-sixties. I’m kind of a late bloomer.
Another social media trope I’ve noticed these days is scolding: “how can you complain about haircuts or boredom when so many vulnerable people are suffering?” Yes, but. Or maybe yes, and?
In fact, I am acutely aware of my privilege in this dark and uncertain time. The sufferings of the world don’t go unnoticed – a recent attack on a maternity hospital in Kabul shocks me to the core, and it makes me furious that workers in a meat packing plant thirty miles from my hometown are getting sick and dying because management refuses to offer adequate protection or to shut down – but my ramblings through George Eliot’s masterpiece have provided a strange kind of solace too, a chance to go slowly and think deeply about what it means to be human. To make the wrong choices for the right reasons, as Dorothea does, for example. To question prejudice and greed and slavish fundamentalism. To try to believe in, and bring out, the best in people. To try, with all my might, to be truly good.
