Eliot and Williams evoke Spring

I'm not a scholar but I admire them. Their ability to relate one thing to something else surpasses stimulus response thinking and weighing that day to day life demands. Scholars think deeply and compare unlike things finding in them the connection, the connectivity between the material and the abstract.

My favorite novel is Middlemarch by George Eliot. Published in 1874 it was Eliot's seventh novel. It impacted literature everywhere. Every year, it is the number one book in England, while two other classics, Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice switch positions for second and third place year after year.

Zadie Smith in her book Changing My Mind writes about Eliot's grand feat in Middlemarch: "What is universal and timeless in literature is need ---we continue to need novelists who seem to know and feel, and who move between these two modes of operation with wondrous fluidity. In Middlemarch love enables knowledge. Love is a kind of knowledge. It's love that enables [Fred] to feel another's pain as if it were his own. For Eliot, in the absence of God, all our moral tests must take place on this earth and have their rewards and punishments here. We are one another's lesson, one another's duty. Middlemarch is a dazzling dramatization of earthly human striving,...satisfaction here, like all the satisfactions Middlemarch offers, is not transcendental, but of the earth. Eliot has replaced metaphysics with human relationships. In doing this she took from ...metaphysics...what she wanted and left what she couldn't use. To make it work, she utilized a cast of saints and princes but also fools and criminals, and every shade of human in between."

If you want a book that intoxicates and nurtures, read Middlemarch....it may take you from now til summer, but that's what spring is for. ...bursting, blossoming, renewing your big project self.

Here's a poem foreshadowing Spring:

This Is Just to Say

by William Carlos Williams

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

& these words evoke newness, too:

"By taking the time each day to check in with ourselves, we begin to rediscover the voice of our instincts, and this is the path to taking charge of our health. By developing daily and seasonal patterns and rhythms based on adding simple drinks, breakfast routines, home food stocks, silence, meditation, and stretching, we can more easily monitor the voice of the body and discover optimal health." Sean Kelly