Comments

Great quotes - offered up without editorial comment for "Cinderella Theory" self-application: "If the shoe fits, wear it".

Thanks, Tom, and to Trevor for reawakening your acquiantance with the oft-profound George Eliot.

Posted by Randy Bosch at June 4, 2010 12:19 PM

Wonderful! Thank you

Posted by PaulH at June 4, 2010 12:36 PM

"Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact."

Amen!

Posted by Dave Wheeler at June 4, 2010 10:27 PM

"Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact."

If people abide by that, it would put an end to the popular
business book publishing industry.

Posted by zorro at June 5, 2010 8:54 AM

Then we must also sit with Rudyard Kipling for a while:

If

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!

Posted by Martijn Sjoorda at June 5, 2010 12:46 PM

Thanks Tom for continued inspiration. Mark Twain said it best: "Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great."

Posted by Trevor Gay at June 5, 2010 4:55 PM

What an ironic comment from Zorro.

Posted by Bruce at June 7, 2010 2:28 PM

“A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past; he is prematurely disappointed in the future.” Sydney Harris

Thanks, Tom for continuing to try to encourage, urge, goad, harangue people into simply thinking, even if they disagree and take some other positive action based upon that disagreement.

Posted by Randy Bosch at June 7, 2010 6:53 PM

I guess I will just include my favorite two passages from her last full novel, "Daniel Deronda," the "hot" novel of her in lit crit for the last 15 yrs..

Chapter 19:

To say that Deronda was romantic would be to misrepresent him; but under his calm and somewhat self-repressed exterior there was a fervour which made him easily find poetry and romance a ong the events of everyday life. And perhaps poetry and romance are as plentiful as ever in the world except for those phlegmatic natures who I suspect would in any age have regarded them as a dull form of erroneous thinking. They exist very easily in the same room with the microscope and even in the railway carriages: what banishes them is the vaccum in gentlemen and lady passengers. How should all the apparatus of heaven and earth , from the fathest firmament to the tender bosom of the mother who nourished us, make poetry for a mind that has no movements of awe and tenderness, no sense of fellowship which thrills from the near to the distant, and back again from the distant to the near."

Eliot is often discussed in terms of the old critical terms metaphor, but in the last decades there have been people , following Roman Jakobson, who talk more about metonymy, a kind of contiguity which bears on her understanding of skepticism, the problem of other mind, the verification and knowledge of a consciousness beyond one's own. Here is a fertile place to think of such questions, the distant to the near and back again... And of course she mentions her greatest theme of all here, sympathy.. Fellowship as she often calls it, or early in Adam Bede, just "fellow feeling."

There is another one which bears on her sense of fiction as a kind of moral philosophy, anticipating the great moral fiction of Henry James, who met GE twice and thought of her as a goddess in every way... Some do not realize how successful she was a translator of David Strauss, Das Leben Jesu, as well as Feuerbach, in his Hegelian Christological work, Essence of Christianity. To grasp his ideas, one must have a very working intimate knowledge of Scripture...

The epigraph to Chapter 11, the first of the second book, with a title also bearing on skepticism ("Meeting Streams") is also wonderful: "The beginning of an acquaintance with persons or things is to get a definite outline of our ignorance." It has a Kantian flavor, in that liminal space between the knowable and the unknowable, for Kant, the phenomenal and the noumenal, and like all Eliot epigraphs, has a great deal to tell us about the narrative that follows.

And it is hard not to love the saucy, spoiled Gwendolen's ode to riding...
"Yes, indeed: I never like my life so well as when I am on a horseback, having a great gallop. I think of nothin I only feel myself strong and happy." So rarely does she have a true sense of her moral personhood, in the words of the great Cavellian critic, Richard Eldridge in his book devoted to the subject (Univ of CHicago, 1988 or so...)

Posted by victoria ordin at June 16, 2010 11:01 PM