Middlemarch 2

Last night, as I read the last seventy-five pages of this—"novel" doesn't seem the right word; one wants something that means "world in a book" or "life woven from paper and ink"—okay, novel, I was deeply moved by this line. This is Dr. Lydgate, after a significant conversation with Dorothea Causabon. Dr. Lydgate, I should mention, had never before considered the possibility of having a significant conversation with any woman. But as he leaves her house a changed man, having been honest for the first time with another human being and with himself, he thinks, "She seems to have what I never saw in any woman before — a fountain of friendship toward men — a man can make a friend of her."

This is the tragedy of which I wrote in yesterday's blog post, the tragedy that it doesn't occur to these men until after friendships must be severed that friendship was possible in the first place. This is a novel about friendship, in that it depicts people who have no friends. Trivial acquaintances are in abundance, but no one in this novel knows how to be or make a friend.

After reading my blog post yesterday, my husband George said, "Don't we have Middlemarch on DVD? Let's watch it." When we realized we have a set of DVDs with dramatizations of five George Eliot novels, my George said, "It will be a George Eliot summer."

This is why one marries one's best friend.