I'm marching right through the very muddy middle of George Eliot's "loose baggy monster" of a Victorian novel (according to Henry James) and trying to understand how her characters, and in parallel, us humans, form our perceptions of love. How do we form these illusive images of those we pin our love upon, only to have these ideals thoroughly dismantled by reality?
"That element of tragedy that lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity"
-Eliot, Middlemarch
Well I suppose we must wad ourselves up against ordinary life if we are to be quick, and this time zone seems to demand quickity. Garance Dore's lines are elegantly quick and poised (I wonder if she too deludes herself in love). She was recently featured on Jay-Z's blog, Life and Times
No comments:
Post a Comment