Blent

I’m reading Middlemarch, by Ms. George Eliot. I say “Ms.” to avoid the bad sit-com conversation about “George” being a man. You know what I mean:

A: “Do you enjoy the works of George Eliot?”

B: “Oh yeah, I read his stuff all the time. Can’t get enough.”

A: “But. But. But, George Eliot was a WOMAN!”

B: Insert hilarious backpeddle.

[Note that the sit-com A character always has to SAY that Eliot is a woman. That’s because they assume that their audience doesn’t already know that. If the person B had implied that “Paris Hilton” were a man, no one would have to explain that she wasn’t. Everyone would just roll on the floor in uncontrollable mirth, thinking about character B’s ignorance.

And it could happen! Paris was a male character in the Iliad, right? Get me a sit-com about a guy brought to the present from a few hundred years ago, and he’ll think Paris, Lauren, Robin, Jordan, Sydney, Taylor, Courteney, and many more are all dudes. OMG! Think how funny it’d be if he said that Paris Hilton was a “dude!” Sitcoms.]

Anyway, until fairly recently, all I knew about George Eliot was that she was not a man. Actually, now that I think about it, all I know about Evelyn Waugh is that he was. I am an ignorant person.

So Eliot’s name came up four times in three days a month ago. I don’t remember why, though I do remember that at least two of those times had something to do with how she isn’t a man. I thought, “I should read something of hers.” I think Middlemarch has made it to the top of a few lists of the greatest novels of all time, so I started there.

I’m about halfway through the 800 or so pages. I like it. I couldn’t have told you that she was a Victorian writer, but now I know she is, and I always liked the Victorian style of writing. Of course, I haven’t read the crappy Victorian stuff, which there surely was. But we generally read the writers who’ve stood the test of time.

Eliot is harder than Dickens. Dickens is funny, his plot lines are simple, and he doesn’t have literary allusions on every page. Eliot seems as though she’s writing for a much more literate audience. Maybe it just seems that way because I personally don’t know the names and events that she mentions. But most of the time, those names and events are incidental to the story, and the story is really good.

But I’m not here to write a book review of Middlemarch. I really just wanted to mention two things she wrote which caught my eye:

1. She said something about how a person can ride two horses at once. This meant that you can be thinking about one thing while doing another. I love how an expression like that can so clearly place the speaker in a time frame. In this case, the time frame envelops everything before about 1930. Future generations reading the expression, “you sound like a broken record,” will place us exactly where we belong. In the dead past.

2. Blent. “The habits of the different ranks were less blent than now.” Instead of “blended.” I love it. (Incidentally, I can’t tell whether she’s being sarcastic here. Does she really mean that they were less blent, or is she saying that they weren’t, even though people today (in the 1870’s) pretend that they were?)