Word: middlemarch
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Going to Harvard is one of the things I've accomplished that I'm most proud of. I learned how to live proactively, making choices about what was more and less important to me. This meant skipping that party on a Saturday night to finally finish Middlemarch, or going out for a Bellhaven the night before the "Matter in the Universe" midterm. At Harvard, I learned that being good to myself meant balancing academic priorities against the other things going on in my life...
...longer than three pages--perfect for attention spans ground down to nothing by TV. No one will mistake Chicken Soup for literature, and in case you miss the point, the cover blurb from Robin ("Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous") Leach is a clue that you're not buying Middlemarch. From book to book, the tone is unvarying: earnest, unadorned and ruthlessly uplifting. The stories are gathered under recurring rubrics--"On Love," "A Matter of Attitude," "Live Your Dream," "Learning to Love Yourself"--and deal with such universal themes as a mother's love, obstacles overcome, misunderstandings resolved, the cuteness...
Literature has better consolations than either life or tabloids. After Diana's funeral one wistfully looks up the quote at the end of George Eliot's Middlemarch and reads: "... For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs...
...Clark's heavy use of metaphors. Every character's gesture and description of setting evokes a precise image in Clark's mind that he can capture only in reference to another. While these images are exacting and often beautiful, they are confusing. In the words of George Eliot's Middlemarch, which Clark was reading while he was writing his novel, "we get our thoughts entangled in metaphors...
...likes of Dickens, Thackeray, Balzac, Eliot and Flaubert used to such great effect. We met earthy Salvadoran maids, beadle-like cops, bumbling civil servants, stalwart limo drivers, beaten-down screenwriters manquas and, of course, comically obsequious houseguests. Occupying the top of the social pecking order in this modern-day Middlemarch was the defendant himself, living a life that would be the envy of any 19th century man of leisure: pleasant days at the country club filled with golf and card playing, nights lost to the social whirl, gentlemanly "work" that consisted of getting paid to play even more golf. Unfailingly...