More thoughts on Middlemarch (also, why Ayn Rand is like keto)
I am up to Chapter LI in Middlemarch (that would be Chapter 51, although I will admit I had to look that up), and it occurred to me two days ago that this book could have just as easily been subtitled The Biographies of Ordinary People.
Because that's what it's about –
more than anything else –
how to live an ordinary life.
Dorothea is on her path from nonsense to sense; Lydgate on his path from sense to nonsense. They meet, in Chapter L (is this deliberate?), while Lydgate is still thoughtful enough to help Dorothea on her way:
“Let Mrs. Casaubon do as she likes,” he said to Sir James, whom he asked to see before quitting the house. “She wants perfect freedom, I think, more than any other prescription.” His attendance on Dorothea while her brain was excited, had enabled him to form some true conclusions concerning the trials of her life. He felt sure that she had been suffering from the strain and conflict of self-repression; and that she was likely now to feel herself only in another sort of pinfold than that from which she had been released.
This assistance, however, can only occur because Dorothea has already done much of the thinking-through on her own. We go from this:
She was always trying to be what her husband wished, and never able to repose on his delight in what she was.
To this:
She had been sitting still for a few minutes, but not in any renewal of the former conflict: she simply felt that she was going to say “Yes” to her own doom: she was too weak, too full of dread at the thought of inflicting a keen-edged blow on her husband, to do anything but submit completely.
To her first acknowledgment of herself as self, as an individual who can choose her own life over anyone else's.
She will choose Will (again, deliberate?) because he also sees himself as an individual:
[...] he was a creature who entered into every one’s feelings, and could take the pressure of their thought instead of urging his own with iron resistance.
Will is able to manage all of this because he sees everyone else as individuals as well. Having grown up in uncertain circumstances, he is able to treat certain members of Middlemarch not as "the poor" but as people – and he even redeems silly Miss Noble by helping her to do the same, turning her from a foolish charity-giver who treats poor children as her pets to a more thoughtful woman who is able to befriend and help a few families.
This isn't to say that Will won't have his own journey to navigate; he's not a hero in the romantic sense, he's a young man figuring things out in his own way:
It is undeniable that but for the desire to be where Dorothea was, and perhaps the want of knowing what else to do, Will would not at this time have been meditating on the needs of the English people or criticising English statesmanship: he would probably have been rambling in Italy sketching plans for several dramas, trying prose and finding it too jejune, trying verse and finding it too artificial, beginning to copy “bits” from old pictures, leaving off because they were “no good,” and observing that, after all, self-culture was the principal point; while in politics he would have been sympathizing warmly with liberty and progress in general. Our sense of duty must often wait for some work which shall take the place of dilettanteism and make us feel that the quality of our action is not a matter of indifference.
When Will starts writing for a political magazine, believing he has found the one true path towards justice for all (note that this path transforms individual into all, here be monsters), Lydgate warns him away from it:
[...] there is nothing more thoroughly rotten than making people believe that society can be cured by a political hocus-pocus.
Which brings us back and back and back again –
to what I told Larry last night.
"Ayn Rand is like keto," I said. "She's got this one good idea, which is that reality is real and you should think for yourself, and then she gives us this set of rules to follow so you don't actually have to think about reality within a complex system, you can put her simple system on top of it instead, and if the rules don't work the way they're supposed to, everyone says you're not following them hard enough."
Then I had to explain to Larry what keto was.
(I will tell you, by the way, that I have tried all of the diet hocus-pocuses – ketosis, carbosis, carnivore, vegetarian, intermittent fasting, three-day fasting, sugar-free, the one where you eat mostly cream, etc. – and none of them did anything but make me sick, in various different ways.)
(I would imagine it is the same for political hocus-pocuses as well, if you'll forgive both the metaphor and the fact that it took me so long to learn it.)
(I always get distracted by monomaniacal ideas that seem like they could work, the One Rule to Wring Them All and so on.)
(Larry never does.)