I went in to the store yesterday and bought Middlemarch
by George Eliot. I wish I had purchased it earlier, when I had the chance at
the used bookstore. It was half that price, and I liked the cover. This book I
love the cover. So, it’s all fine. I know this is an important book overall,
and an important book for me to read. This is a destiny book in a way. But not
one of the younger destiny books. This is more of an approaching middle age
destiny book if there could be such a thing. I have been reading the snippets
or vignettes taken from larger pieces of work, such as The Mill and the Floss,
and Middlemarch itself, and just have to dive in.
It’s been a long time coming.
I don’t have the education on paper, being more an autodidact than anything else, to read the
book as well as some others might be able to. Contextually, anyhow. But I have the talent to
understand the words, and to understand intuitively what is happening and more
importantly, what is meant by it all. George Eliot would be an alien in these
times, but any psychological insights or even questions, - are timeless in a
way. Not all actually, not ‘any’, but ‘many.’ So I know I can handle the book.
The introduction is by A.S. Byatt (sp?), and is wonderful. A lot like Eliot in
a way. It said what I somehow expected, suspected. It said, among other things,
that Eliot, and I paraphrase heavily here, - that she does not belong really to
the Victorian woman writers. Though she may appear to belong to the genre of
the Bronte sisters and so on, says the intro,- she is not merely painting a
time period, its mores, nuances, hierarchies, et al. It says, and this is the
wonderful part, that she is of the same soul-gene pool (my term), as Goethe,
Proust, and Thomas Mann.
The introduction writer has seen the importance of
women, and transcended it perhaps w/out knowing it, - by categorizing Eliot as a
writer first (to my way of reading it at least). And to me, it does not matter
if the writer is a man, woman, or green alien. What I care about primarily is I would think reversed from that of most other readers. It is not plot per se, or even character development, though those and other elements like them can be really be a pure joy at times. It is, instead,- that moment
when the descriptive prose passages of a given work does something quite fourth dimensional, - when literature
as art surpasses itself and almost or does flip over into a spiritual or
semi-spiritual experience. And so well wrought is her writing that this has
already happened during two sentences. I am only twenty pages or so in.
So it’s going to be an adventure. Like East of
Eden. Or IQ84. Or several others. Embarking on the reading of a new book, if
the reader is serious enough to truly care, is like going on a voyage. I am
aboard now, and floating off from the docks. I can relate through postcards
where I went, but I shall not be able to really perhaps evoke the feeling that
a reader can receive when reading something great.
And so the autodidact sets out on the ocean.
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