I'm reading Middlemarch again. It's either my fourth or fifth time through the best novel ever written in the English language. If you want to know about the nineteenth century, start with George Eliot.
I had the oddest feelings fifty pages in. (Actually, "pages" is an anachronism because I am reading on the kindle.) Lydgate is flirting with beautiful, empty-headed Rosamund Vincy. I thought "this time let him be smart; let him not marry Rosamund." I must have been in an unusally plastic frame of mind, or in some sort of reading reverie. I know that novels are immutable, but I was hoping against hope that Lydgate had learned something since the last time I read the novel. Even though he made a fool of himself with that actress in Paris. And then last night, just before I turned out the lights, Lydgate did it again — fell for the blonde curls and the glistening eye. He's learned nothing, not a thing, in the last ten years. And now I have to live through the saga as his crush turns into crushing disappointment and bitterness. Marry in haste, repent at leisure. Poor Lydgate.
The kindle changes the input but doesns't do a thing for the outcome.
Leave a Reply