Driving to and from Bloomington, where I go to my office at Indiana University three days a week, the interstate unfurls and my mind can travel along with my body. 

I see the land grow hilly and wooded as I go south. From my start date in September to December, I watch autumn advance. Days shorten: I set out before dawn and return around sundown. Leaves inflame, then drop. I like the morning drives best when mist pools in the dells of cornfields.

But any landscape grows mundane when seen often. I decided to use the time to “read,” listening to an author I somehow never encountered in my years of literary study: George Eliot. I chose to begin with her most famous book, Middlemarch, which in audiobook format runs at 35 hours.

The poetic language revealing universal truths struck me first. I wished I could flag many gorgeous passages that not only capture the heights and depths of our human condition, but also wrought sublimity out of the English language. I was, of course, constrained by driving. I appreciated that I could use a control on the steering wheel to skip back and repeat a challenging sentence or relish a delicious metaphor. Thankfully, many other readers have collected passages, some of which bejewel this post.

“Character is not cut in marble—it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.”

“Our deeds still travel with us from afar

And what we have been makes us what we are.”

—George Eliot, Middlemarch

Keen observers of human nature can be cynical, jeering at our many flaws. But not Eliot. By exposing her characters’ hearts to us, she teaches compassion, even for those who have made selfish, harmful choices. Consider, for instance, how she summons us to empathize with a man who might seem to merit only contempt, a wealthy scholar who has married a beautiful and kind young woman, but cannot love her:

“It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self—never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted.” —George Eliot, Middlemarch

Who hasn’t, at least at some point, been imprisoned by “a small hungry shivering self”?

Readers spend ages with each character; it feels impossible to scorn someone whose fears and aspirations we have contemplated at length. There are no villains here, no easy judgments, no simple answers. Over and over, I found myself wanting to dismiss a character as shallow, foolish, greedy, or self-righteous. Over and over, Eliot thwarted me, forcing me to dwell with the other’s yearnings, sorrows, and hopes—and my own. 

“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” —George Eliot, Middlemarch

Indeed, for me, Eliot’s attention to the inner life of the inhabitants of the town of Middlemarch gives the novel its profundity. There is outer action, but it’s the analysis of the psyches and spirits producing these actions that enthralled me. I started to watch an adaptation of the novel, but I quickly realized that no predominantly visual medium can reproduce such interiority.

“People are almost always better than their neighbors think they are.” —George Eliot, Middlemarch

Middlemarch resists reduction to a central theme, but for me, now in my thirties, the maturing of youth into full adulthood resonated most. Three young women and three young men set out in naïveté. Most of them cling to lofty hopes: A spouse will guarantee my eternal bliss! My brilliant mind will produce discoveries and win me renown! I have been chosen by fortune to be effortlessly prosperous! For much of the book, we watch the characters crash into obstinate realities that force them to drop many of their illusions and move forward with wisdom hard-won—scarred, yes, but ennobled. 

“If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new.” —George Eliot, Middlemarch

Striving and strife to find a purpose varies little between the 1820s, when the fictional Dorothea, Will, Rosamund, Tertius, Mary, and Fred came of age, and the 2020s. Our true purpose, despite a million messages to the contrary, has nothing to do with earthly glory:

“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: 

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.”

—George Eliot, Middlemarch