Dorothea and Will discuss the meaning of life
We need something non-pandemic-related, or at least I do. A tweet by a philosopher reminded me of a passage in Middlemarch, so seeing as how it’s long out of copyright I’ll just share it. From chapter 39:
Dorothea felt wretched. She thought her husband altogether in the wrong, on more grounds than Will had mentioned.
“It is better for us not to speak on the subject,” she said, with a tremulousness not common in her voice, “since you and Mr. Casaubon disagree. You intend to remain?” She was looking out on the lawn, with melancholy meditation.
“Yes; but I shall hardly ever see you now,” said Will, in a tone of almost boyish complaint.
“No,” said Dorothea, turning her eyes full upon him, “hardly ever. But I shall hear of you. I shall know what you are doing for my uncle.”
“I shall know hardly anything about you,” said Will. “No one will tell me anything.”
“Oh, my life is very simple,” said Dorothea, her lips curling with an exquisite smile, which irradiated her melancholy. “I am always at Lowick.”
“That is a dreadful imprisonment,” said Will, impetuously.
“No, don’t think that,” said Dorothea. “I have no longings.”
He did not speak, but she replied to some change in his expression. “I mean, for myself. Except that I should like not to have so much more than my share without doing anything for others. But I have a belief of my own, and it comforts me.”
“What is that?” said Will, rather jealous of the belief.
“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.”
“That is a beautiful mysticism—it is a—”
“Please not to call it by any name,” said Dorothea, putting out her hands entreatingly. “You will say it is Persian, or something else geographical. It is my life. I have found it out, and cannot part with it. I have always been finding out my religion since I was a little girl. I used to pray so much—now I hardly ever pray. I try not to have desires merely for myself, because they may not be good for others, and I have too much already. I only told you, that you might know quite well how my days go at Lowick.”
“God bless you for telling me!” said Will, ardently, and rather wondering at himself. They were looking at each other like two fond children who were talking confidentially of birds.
“What is your religion?” said Dorothea. “I mean—not what you know about religion, but the belief that helps you most?”
“To love what is good and beautiful when I see it,” said Will. “But I am a rebel: I don’t feel bound, as you do, to submit to what I don’t like.”
“But if you like what is good, that comes to the same thing,” said Dorothea, smiling.
“Now you are subtle,” said Will.
“Yes; Mr. Casaubon often says I am too subtle. I don’t feel as if I were subtle,” said Dorothea, playfully. “But how long my uncle is! I must go and look for him. I must really go on to the Hall. Celia is expecting me.”
I’ve felt much he same way myself. Except for the little girl part. I was fortunate that my family was not particularly religious; I was not inculcated with anything at home, and what church I had didn’t really take. Our church attendance waxed and waned, but I never really recalled or retained much. As such it made no real demands upon me, no expectations or enforcement of any sort of orthodoxy , conformity, or public commitment. I guess the United Church of Canada was relaxed and wishy-washy enough that I had nothing monolithic or concrete against which I might have “rebelled.” As a result, I was able to approach the tenets of Christianity on my own terms, without a lot of filtration and baggage baked into my perceptions. The seeds of my doubt about Christianity were planted when I was about eight years old. (See http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2018/guest-post-it-started-with-that-little-sparrow/)> Over time they grew, slowly but relentlessly.
As a teen I read the gospels a number of times and was always moved by the selfless, compassionate parts of the story of Jesus. Not the signs, wonders and miracles, but the basic human decency bits. And I knew it was bits, that the stories had contradictions and inconsistancies, that some of it was questionable. I was making my own “rules for God,” (and I knew that the God of the Bible was already breaking a bunch of them. Even at that age I knew that 1) the god of the Old Testament, was not for me, and 2) the New Testament stuff outside of the gospels was an add-on. (It wasn’t until much later that I came to realize how cobbled together and essentially fictional the gospels themselves were.) It wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I gave up on the god idea altogether.
I’m in my late fifties and I’m still learning, trying to figure things out. As Kurt Vonnegut used to say “I just got here!” Hell, as a “global” civilization, we’ve “just got here” too. Increasing degrees of awareness, starting in earnest about five hundred years ago with the commencement of the European voyages of “discovery,” (complete with a lethal mix of imperial conquest, ignorant blundering, and calculated brutality that resulted in the concomitant genocide, slavery, plunder and extinction from which wewill never really recover), have linked hitherto isolated societies, not all willingly, into a now more or less universally aware “whole.” Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot” passage is a pretty good starting point. We are still at the beginning of figuring out how everything fits together and have yet to learn how to live correctly within what we have already learned. Reading Jensen has made me start to rethink the cost and bnefits of civilization itself. Our time to do this is limited.
Indeed. My wife and I are far from well-to-do or wealthy, but we realize just how lucky we are, how badly off many other people are, and more and more, how our own way of life comes at a cost to other people and the planet as a whole.
I’ll take an honest, questioning uncertainty over a confident, rigid truth taken from texts proclaimed to be the word of god(s), that have no knowledge of bacteria, galaxies or wombats. To expand on Dorothea’s point, I would say evil = ignorance and greed, among other things. Trump may represent, one hopes, a last ditch offensive of a, one hopes, dying worldview, but having to counter the resurgent forces of “darkness” at such a crucial time, drains energy and resources from the efforts required to try to shift humanity into a way of living that works within the way the world actual works.
I know this post was intended as an escape from the current crisis, but the unfolding calamity prompted me to post the following on my Facebook page, which I think fits in to some of what Dorothea is saying about the struggle against darkness:
The current crisis sparked by the Covid-19 pandemic reveals just how interconnected and interdependent we are. We see clearly how our lives are, quite literally, in each other’s hands. They always have been. They always will be. As strong as these links are to our fellow human beings, we are even more dependent upon, and connected with the Earth as a whole. The air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, bind us tightly to all life on Earth, and to the cycles and cascades of elements and energy in which we are all rooted, and from which we all spring. As we face this frightening experience of the coronavirus together, may we come to understand how closely connected we are to each other, human and other-than-human, and emerge from this trial with a deeper appreciation of this fundamental, underlying unity. Be well and safe my friends.
Not an escape exactly, just a break from me constantly banging on about it. Beautifully said.
“connected with the Earth as a whole” Your Name’s not Bruce? #1
Alanna Shaikh
https://youtu.be/JGTtGCq9grE
has both broad and focused perspectives on covid-19 (Mar 17, 2020 16:19). “The choices we make about how we occupy this planet make outbreaks inevitable.”