Felix Holt quote from chapter 6

George Eliot strikes again (does she know people or does she know people!):

The stronger will always rule, say some, with an air of confidence which is like a lawyer's flourish, forbidding exceptions or additions. But what is strength? Is it blind wilfulness that sees no terrors, no many-linked consequences, no bruises and wounds of those whose cords it tightens? Is it the narrowness of a brain that conceives no needs differing from its own, and looks to no results beyond the bargains of to-day; that tugs with emphasis for every small purpose, and thinks it weakness to exercise the sublime power of resolved renunciation? There is a sort of subjection which is the peculiar heritage of largeness and of love; and strength is often only another name for willing bondage to irremediable weakness.

From Felix Holt: The Radical chapter 6

Felix Holt quote from Chapter 27

More quotes from George Eliot's Felix Holt: The Radical (Felix himself speaking, of course)

"I have to determine for myself, and not for other men. I don't blame them, or think I am better than they; their circumstances are different. I would never choose to withdraw myself from the labour and common burthen of the world; but I do choose to withdraw myself from the push and scramble for money and position. Any man is at liberty to call me a fool, and say that mankind are benefited by the push and the scramble in the long-run. But I care for the people who live now and will not be living when the long-run comes. As it is, I prefer going shares with the unlucky."

and:

"I'm determined never to go about making my face simpering or solemn, and telling professional lies for profit; or to get tangled in affairs where I must wink at dishonesty and pocket the proceeds, and justify the knavery as part of a system I can't alter. If I once went into that sort of struggle for success, I should want to win -- I should defend the wrong that I had once identified myself with. I should become everything that I see beforehand to be detestable. I should do this, as men are doing it every day, for the ridiculously small prize -- perhaps for none at all -- perhaps for the sake of two parlours, a rank eligible for churchwardenship, a discontented wife and several unhopeful children."

Felix Holt quote from Chapter 1

"The mother's love is at first an absorbing delight, blunting all other sensibilities; it is an expansion of the animal existence; it enlarges the imagined range for self to move in: but in after years it can only continue to be joy on the same terms as other long-lived love -- that is, by much suppression of self, and power of living in the experience of another." - George Eliot from Felix Holt: The Radical Chapter 1

An old argument against universal literacy

Obviously this opinion is not held by the author (or myself) but I enjoy this ancient furze-cutter's reasoning: 'Ah, there's too much of that sending to school these days! It only does harm. Every gatepost and barn's door you come to is sure to have some bad word or other chalked upon it by the young rascals: a woman can hardly pass for shame sometimes. If they'd never been taught how to write they wouldn't have been able to scribble such villainy. Their fathers couldn't do it, and the country was all the better for it.' Extracted from Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native (from the first chapter of Book Second)

Anne Fadiman through the tulips

I recently borrowed Anne Fadiman's Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader from a friend and thoroughly enjoyed it. I have lifted a few excerpts and placed them here the better to remember it by. I am sorry for the lack of context which would add even more richness to many of the quotes but will have only to recommend that you find and read the book in its entirety. I have entwined the quotes with pictures of last year's tulips because flowers and renewal cannot come soon enough to the darkness of this tired and dirty world. "After five years of marriage and a child, George and I finally resolved that we were ready for the more profound intimacy of library consolidation." "Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure." "My sonnets looked like poems. They quacked like poems. But at seventeen, when I got to college and my critical faculties suddenly kicked in, I had to admit that they weren't really poems. I had mistaken for lyric genius what was in fact merely the genetic facility for verbal problem-solving that enabled everyone in my family to excel at crossword puzzles, anagrams, and Scrabble." "During the next thirty years I came to realize that just as there is more than one way to love a person, so is there more than one way to love a book." "To us, a book's words were holy, but the paper, cloth, cardboard, glue, thread, and ink that contained them were a mere vessel, and it was no sacrilege to treat them as wantonly as desire and pragmatism dictated. Hard use was a sign not of disrespect but of intimacy." "On the sanguinary fields of gender politics, Ms. has scored a clear victory. I wish I could say the same of, say, the United Church of Christ's new 'inclusive' hymnal, in which "Dear Lord and Father of Mankind" has been replaced by "Dear God, Embracing Humankind." The end is estimable; it's the means that chafe. I'm not sure I want to be embraced by an Almighty with so little feeling for poetry. Yet, having heard the new version, I can't say I feel entirely happy with the old one either. As is all too often the case these days, I find my peace as a reader and writer rent by a war between two opposing semantic selves, one feminist and one reactionary." "I believe that although my father and E. B. White were not misogynists, they didn't really see women, and their language reflected and reinforced that blind spot." "What I am saying here is very simple: Changing our language to make men and women equal has a cost. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. High prices are attached to many things that are on the whole worth doing. It does mean that the loss of our heedless grace should be mourned, and then accepted with all the civility we can muster, by every writer worth his'er salt." "Our father, who often boasted that he had never actually done anything except think, was still the same person he had been when he started collecting books in the early 1920s. He and his library had never diverged. Our mother, on the other hand, had once led a life of action. And why had she stopped? Because she had had children. Her books, which seemed the property of a woman I had never met, defined the size of the sacrifice my brother and I had exacted." "Other people's walls looked naked to me. Ours weren't flat white backdrops for pictures. They were works of art themselves, floor-to-ceiling mosaics whose vividly pigmented tiles were all tall skinny rectangles, pleasant to the touch and even, if one liked the dusty fragrance of old paper, to the sniff." "Now you know why I married my husband. In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar." "In a secondhand bookstore, each volume is one-of-a-kind, neither replaceable from a publisher's warehouse nor visually identical to its original siblings, which have accreted individuality with every change of ownership. If I don't buy the book now, I may never have another chance. And therefore, like Beecher, who believed the temptations of drink were paltry compared with the temptations of books, I am weak." " "It was only when I saw his bookshelves--James Bond paperbacks cheek by jowl with nineteenth-century parliamentary proceedings--that I got a sense of who Clive really was. His intellectual furnishings explained him in a way his lectures hadn't. "Dispersing his library was like cremating a body and scattering it to the winds. I felt sad. And I realized that books get their value from the way the coexist with the other books a person owns, and that when they lose their context, the lose their meaning." "

Wendell Berry on discrimination

“Condemnation by category is the lowest form of hatred, for it is cold-hearted and abstract, lacking even the courage of a personal hatred” - Wendell Berry

The quote was taken from the following article: http://abpnews.com/culture/social-issues/item/8130-wendell-berry-expounds-on-gay-marriage#.UPWd-x1LUg2 I am not hoping to raise this issue here but have found, as usual, that his argument is balanced, fresh, and compelling.

These pictures are completely unrelated to this post but I have a problem with blogger in that they do not show my paragraph breaks so the only way I have found to break up the text is to insert an image. I'm sure there is some way to get around this but I haven't found it yet. Hence the pictures.

More Aurora

Many feverent souls
Strike rhyme on rhyme, who would strike steel on steel
If steel had offered, in a restless heat
Of doing something. Many tender souls
Have strung their losses on a rhyming thread,
As children, cowslips: - the more pains they take,
The work more withers. Young men, ay, and maids,
Too often sow their wild oats in tame verse,
Before they sit down under their own vine
And live for use. Alas, near all the birds
Will sing at dawn, - and yet we do not take
The chaffering swallow for the holy lark.

I wonder if this applies to me. Do I only feel the need to create because it is one of the things close to hand right now or is it really a necessity for me? I think ad hope that the latter is true. I do not aspire to be an Artist to the extent that she speaks of artists but my dabbling I believe has more to it than a slight fancy and convenience. Time will tell, I suppose.

struggling

It has been quite a while since I have posted a quote from Oswald Chambers. The end of today's entry from My Utmost for His Highest struck me especially because I often think about the reasons to read a book and benefits derived from such an activity:

The Author who benefits you most is not the one who tells you something you did not know before, but the one who gives expression to the truth that has been dumbly struggling in you for utterance.

This along with a line at the beginning of the entry reminded me of a comment a friend made last night while discussion types of artists. He said that artists are either Mozarts and Beethovens: either ideas/inspirations come easily or they have to be worked out with a struggle. I definitely see myself more on the struggling side of the line. Unfortunately, in a lot of ways, I would rather not bother with the struggle which is why this following quote is pertinent to me:

If you cannot express yourself on any subject, struggle until you can. If you do not, someone will be the poorer all the days of his life.

Of course, I think this depends on the quality of the sentiment struggling to be expressed...

Once more unto the quotes, dear friends...

I realize that I have been behindhand in writing out some of the quotes that I have been gleaning from books and because I am also slightly behindhand in the gleanings I feel a remedy of one might help the other. I have finished re-reading Emma and part of the time I had my quote/note book (I would combine the two words but am prevented by the difficulty stemming from their similarity) with me and so gleaned a few felicitous quotes. I love Austen's style and, although many of her turns of phrase are only seen perfectly when viewed in full context of the plot and what has gone before, I did manage to find some quotes that are quite as good when lifted from the pages and set by themselves.

Having been attending, for the past few months, country dances in my small town, I am finding that I understand and have experienced many of the feelings described as surrounding such events in Austen's work. I believe that I may have posted something further on this topic earlier so I will suffice it to say that now that I am in the habit of attending these dances I gladly put myself in the place of the young people mentioned in this quote:

It may be possible to do without dancing entirely. Instances have been known of young people passing many, many months successively, without being at a ball of any description, and no material injury accrue either to body or mind; - but when a beginning is made - when felicities of rapid motion have once been, though slightly, felt - it must be a very heavy set that does not ask for more.

Being, as I am, interested in linguistics, grammar, and also the imagination, I laughed at the following quote:

Such an adventure as this, - a fine young man and a lovely young woman thrown together in such a way, could hardly fail of suggesting certain ideas to the coldest heart and the steadiest brain. So Emma thought, at least. Could a linguist, could a grammarian, could even a mathematician have seen what she did, have witnessed their appearance together, and heard their history of it, without feeling that circumstances had been at work to make them peculiarly interesting to each other? - How much more must an imaginist, like herself, be on fire with speculation and foresight!

Finally a quick quote that mirrors what I often experience:

Emma denied none of it aloud, and agreed to none of it in private.

I know this is not a good thing but there you have it.
And there you have three lovely quotes from one of my favourite authors.

sacrifice

A couple weeks ago I heard a quote I really liked and have since received a copy of the chapter from which it came. I am enjoying the chapter and just ran into the paragraph that I remember so thought I should post it here:

Sacrifice is at the center of the work of salvation. Sacrifice is God's way of dealing with what is wrong in history, which is to say, what is wrong with us, individually and collectively. It is God's way of dealing with sin.

Sacrifice. All the ways we have of dealing with what is wrong with the world, whether that wrong is named "sin" or not, are in stark contrast to this. Our typical ways are through force (getting rid of what is wrong by destroying it or containing it or policing it), by education (teaching people right from wrong, and hoping that when they know the difference they will do what is right), by entertainment (distracting people from what is wrong with the world by giving them excitement and diversion, temporary vacations from the wrong), by economic improvement (providing incentives and opportunities to improve peoples' lives so that they will not out of despair and desparation, anger and retaliation, make a further mess out of things). None of these approaches is without merit. All of them in ways small and large make the world better. But none of them are God's way of accomplishing salvation. God's choice is sacrifice.

This is taken from Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places (incidentally this is a line from G.M. Hopkins) by Eugene Peterson.

closing thoughts

I have finally finished Bleak House but I will quote it one more time before moving on:

[she had] a predestined aptitude for doing something objectionable.

He had so long been thoroughly persuaded of the weight and import to mankind of any word he said, that his words really had come to sound as if there were something in them.

One thing I do enjoy about Dickens is his excellent descriptions and his way of encapsulating the essence of a character within a short sentence or two. There were a few places where the going was heavy but for the most part I think I shall miss ploughing through Dickens as I turn to lighter material in the next little while. I still have to read Dombey and Son and Little Dorrit (I'm possibly forgetting one or two other novels of his) and I'm sure there are many of his novels that I wouldn't mind reading multiple times but there is still something special about the first run through a novel that is usually missing the second time through (even if the plot has been forgot in the mean time). So as much as I am happy that I am reaching my goal of reading all of Dickens, I am also sad that the end is approaching.

Perception

From an interesting article in the New York Times on mirrors

In a report titled “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Enhancement in Self-Recognition,” which appears online in The Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Nicholas Epley and Erin Whitchurch described experiments in which people were asked to identify pictures of themselves amid a lineup of distracter faces. Participants identified their personal portraits significantly quicker when their faces were computer enhanced to be 20 percent more attractive. They were also likelier, when presented with images of themselves made prettier, homelier or left untouched, to call the enhanced image their genuine, unairbrushed face. Such internalized photoshoppery is not simply the result of an all-purpose preference for prettiness: when asked to identify images of strangers in subsequent rounds of testing, participants were best at spotting the unenhanced faces.

How can we be so self-delusional when the truth stares back at us? “Although we do indeed see ourselves in the mirror every day, we don’t look exactly the same every time,” explained Dr. Epley, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. There is the scruffy-morning you, the assembled-for-work you, the dressed-for-an-elegant-dinner you. “Which image is you?” he said. “Our research shows that people, on average, resolve that ambiguity in their favor, forming a representation of their image that is more attractive than they actually are.”

When we look in the mirror, our relative beauty is not the only thing we misjudge. In a series of studies, Dr. Bertamini and his colleagues have interviewed scores of people about what they think the mirror shows them. They have asked questions like, Imagine you are standing in front of a bathroom mirror; how big do you think the image of your face is on the surface? And what would happen to the size of that image if you were to step steadily backward, away from the glass?

People overwhelmingly give the same answers. To the first question they say, well, the outline of my face on the mirror would be pretty much the size of my face. As for the second question, that’s obvious: if I move away from the mirror, the size of my image will shrink with each step.

Both answers, it turns out, are wrong. Outline your face on a mirror, and you will find it to be exactly half the size of your real face. Step back as much as you please, and the size of that outlined oval will not change: it will remain half the size of your face (or half the size of whatever part of your body you are looking at), even as the background scene reflected in the mirror steadily changes. Importantly, this half-size rule does not apply to the image of someone else moving about the room. If you sit still by the mirror, and a friend approaches or moves away, the size of the person’s image in the mirror will grow or shrink as our innate sense says it should.

What is it about our reflected self that it plays by such counterintuitive rules? The important point is that no matter how close or far we are from the looking glass, the mirror is always halfway between our physical selves and our projected selves in the virtual world inside the mirror, and so the captured image in the mirror is half our true size.

Rebecca Lawson, who collaborates with Dr. Bertamini at the University of Liverpool, suggests imagining that you had an identical twin, that you were both six feet tall and that you were standing in a room with a movable partition between you. How tall would a window in the partition have to be to allow you to see all six feet of your twin?

The window needs to allow light from the top of your twin’s head and from the bottom of your twin’s feet to reach you, Dr. Lawson said. These two light sources start six feet apart and converge at your eye. If the partition is close to your twin, the upper and lower light points have just begun to converge, so the opening has to be nearly six feet tall to allow you a full-body view. If the partition is close to you, the light has nearly finished converging, so the window can be quite small. If the partition were halfway between you and your twin, the aperture would have to be — three feet tall. Optically, a mirror is similar, Dr. Lawson said, “except that instead of lighting coming from your twin directly through a window, you see yourself in the mirror with light from your head and your feet being reflected off the mirror into your eye.”

This is one partition whose position we cannot change.

I think I'm going to have to check out this last experiment even though it makes some sense on paper it makes no sense to my senses. I wonder if it because the mirror itself gets further away and our perception of thie image is smaller once we move but that the image stays the same. Crazy.

Extract

from Charlotte Bronte's Villette:

There is a perverse mood of the mind which is rather soothed than irritated by misconstruction; and in quarters where we can never be rightly known, we take pleasure, I think, in being consummately ignored.

architects of change

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not political legislators, who implement change after the fact. art exerts a profound influence on the style of life, the mode, range and direction of perception. Art tells us what we know and don't know that we know.

You can't tell anybody anything he doesn't know already.

-William Burroghs

I like the two points being made here. I don't know if I fully agree with the second. I'll have to think about it a bit more. It does tie in with the concept of education that connects its function to the roots of the word itself--a leading out of knowledge already possessed. I do agree with it to a certain extent but the jury's still out whether I take it as a complete model of how things work.

advantages in authorship

Chroniclers are privileged to enter where they list, to come and go through keyholes, to ride upon the wind, to overcome, in their soarings up and down, all obstacles of distance, time and place. Thrice blessed be this last consideration, since it enables us to follow the disdainful Miggs even into the sanctity of her chamber, and to hold her sweet companionship through the dreary watches of the night!
(opening of chapter 9 in Barnaby Rudge by Dickens)

Ah bliss.

consolation

In the exhaustless catalogue of Heaven's mercies to mankind, the power we have of finding some germs of comfort in the hardest trials must ever occupy the foremost place; not only because it supports and upholds us when most require to be sustained, but because in this source of consolation there is something, we have reason to believe, of the divine spirit; something of the goodness which detects amidst our own evil doings, a redeeming quality; something which, even in our fallen nature, we possess in common with the angels; which had its being in the old time when they trod the earth, and lingers on yet, in pity.

Charles Dickens' Barnaby Rudge Ch 47
Don't quite agree with his whole theology here but like the central idea. I also appreciate this fine example of a paragraph-long sentence. Perhaps I should show something like this to my profs when they accuse me of being too wordy.

repetition

For say a foolish thing but oft enough
(And here's the secret of a hundred creeds,
Men get opinions as boys learn to spell,
By re-iteration chiefly,) the same thing
Shall pass at last for absolutly wise

Aurora Leigh (book six, lines 4-8) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

hollow honesty

Men who are thoroughly false and hollow, seldom try to hide those vices from themselves; and yet in the very act of avowing them, they lay claim to the virtues they feign most to despise. 'For,' say they 'this is honesty, this is truth. All mankind are like us, but they have not the candor to avow it.' The more they affect to deny the existence of any sincerity in the world, the more they would be thought to possess it in its boldest shape; and this is an unconscious compliment to Truth on the part of these philosophers, which will turn to laugh against them to the Day of Judgement.

excerpt from Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens

On Reading

Or else I sate on in my chamber green,
And lived my life, and thought my thoughts, and prayed
My prayers without the vicar; read my books,
Without considering whether they were fit
To do me good. Mark, there. We get no good
By being ungenerous, even to a book,
And calculating profits, - so much help
By so much reading. It is rather when
We gloriously forget ourselves and plunge
Soul-forward, headlong, into a book's profound,
Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth -
'Tis then we get the right good from a book.

-Elizabeth Barret Browning: Aurora Leigh 1.698-709

some quotes

The following quotes are from three of the plays that I have been reading for Romlit this year (A Bold Stroke for a Husband, Blue-Beard, Timour the Tartar

Yes, he has a very pretty kind of conversation; 'tis like a parenthesis[...] it might all be left out, and never miss'd.

One may as well marry a looking-glass as a woman who constantly reflects back one's own sentiments, and one's own whims.

Nay, we want no thanks. Men are unworthy of succour in their own time of need, who will not be active to relieve the sufferings of their fellows.

Ah! Believe me, 'tis only in the Cottage, that real Happiness resides. Desolate with snow, or terrible with fire, on the haughty Mountain's Summit never yet did flower bloom: the Rose and the Violet are only found in the lowly verdant valley!