How to start: Part way through reading this book, I googled its importance for reassurance. It is, as Robert McCrum wrote in 2014, “supremely a work of serious literature. According to Virginia Woolf, it is ‘one of the few English novels written for grown-up people’.” To quote McCrum again, it is “a work of genius” and his article provides a glimpse at why.
Favourite quotes: “Notions and scruples were like spilt needles, making one afraid of treading, or sitting down, or even eating.” (p. 22)
“Sometimes, when her uncle’s easy way of talking did not happen to be exasperating, it was rather soothing.” (p. 39)
“We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, ‘Oh, nothing!’ Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts - not to hurt others.” (p. 62)
[About Casaubon’s blood not being red:] “‘no, somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass, and it was all semicolons and parenthesis,’ said Mrs. Codewallader.” (p. 70)
“That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the course 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.” (p. 189).
“Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour’s buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.” (p. 201)
“The best piety is to enjoy - when you can. You are doing the most then to save the earth’s character as an agreeable planet. And enjoyment radiates.” (p. 213)
“You will hardly demand that his confidence should have a basis in external facts; such confidence, we know, is something less course and materialistic: it is a comfortable disposition leading us to expect that the wisdom of providence or the folly of our friends, the mysteries of luck or the still greater mystery of our high individual value in the universe, will bring about agreeable issues, such as are consistent with our good taste in costume, and our general preference for the best style of a thing.” (p. 220)
“He was one or those rare men who are rigid to themselves and indulgent to others.” (p. 223)
“Indeed we are most of us brought up in the notion that the highest motive for not doing a wrong is something irrespective of the beings who would suffer the wrong.” (p. 239)
“‘Poor dear Dido how dreadful!’ said Celia, feeling as much grieved as her own perfect happiness would allow.” (p. 275)
“Mr Casaubon, indeed, had not thoroughly represented those mixed reasons to himself; irritated feeling with him as with all of us, seeking rather for justification than for self-knowledge.” (p. 316)
“That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil - widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.” (p. 276)
“What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?” (p. 421)
Tangential: If another argument for reading Middlemarch should be made, I really enjoy Kathryne Schulz’s “What Is It About Middlemarch?”