The Eiffel Tower by Blaise Mariétan
To you, dear readers, all my warmest wishes for the New Year. May 2012 be a year of fresh beginnings, of actions fructified by the heart, of solidarity born of mutual trust, of inspirations, creative élan and resplendent health. And may the list go on in this vein!
The day after Christmas we drove to Normandy, to a region referred to as La Suisse Normade because, I suppose, of a very vague resemblance to Switzerland. This is not alpine country, but the landscape undulates more emphatically here than elsewhere in Normandy and above the Orne river an impressive rise of cliffs adds drama to the otherwise uneventful (cows and grass, more cows, more grass) but lovely (green, green, green!) scenery.
Looking down at the Orne River from the Route des Crêtes.
Winter berries dangling above not quite procumbent cow
We took long two to three hour walks everyday, cheered on the cows, slept heaps, read and drank a deliciously earthy terroir type cider made by the locals. A perfect respite after the madness of work and the holidays!
One of the most appreciated aspects of this week-long pastoral escape was the time it afforded me to read. I took along copy of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, a novel I’ve saved till now to read – I have no idea why apart from the fact that the great classics are many and I am slowly making my way through the stacks – and am enjoying immensely. I vaguely remember reading Silas Marner as a teen-ager, upon my mother’s recommendation I believe, and finding it a rather bleak, dark story. Eliot’s humour, for she knows just when to light the comic wick, must have flown right by me back then, because it caught me completely by surprise in Middlemarch, which I expected to be a bit heavy going. It is not. Reading the novel has been a complete delight; the acuity of Eliot’s observations, the patience and insight with which she delves into her characters’ motivations strike me as exquisite and almost preternaturally perfect. How did she do it? Because there is simply too much to say about this book for a blog post, I’d like to share just a line from chapter XII in relation to the character Mary Garth that spoke to me powerfully:
Eliot writes that Mary had a “strong current of gratitude towards those who, instead of telling her that she ought to be contented, did something to make her so.”
I’d like to ruminate on this a moment at the risk of sounding like one of the novel’s many preachers (I shall try to avoid the sanctimonious strains of Pastor Tyke). Do we – if you don’t mind my including you in the query — go around telling people, particularly our children, that they should be happy, grateful, delighted, positive etc. when they are clearly experiencing just the opposite emotion or do we do we actually manage to act towards them in a way that brings forth the feeling? Eliot, in this extraordinarily pithy sentence, seems to be pointing to a truth that we often overlook regarding the difference between acting upon judgment and feeling, and which of the two gets the work done. There is a great deal of finger pointing, reputation wrecking and calculating going on in Middlemarch as the characters vie for better social positions and establish their alliances. Mary Garth, because of her plainness we are told (one however, which “Rembrandt would have painted with pleasure.”) remains outside this dynamic, a position allowing her “reigning virtue,” her “honesty and truth-telling fairness,” to function as the novel’s moral compass. Mary Garth is a holder of keys and here is one that will get us into the Garden of Good Rapport.
To illustrate Eliot’s point let us take a banal example of how we fail to catch the key Mary tosses us. What is the most common refrain used by parents to get their finicky children to finish the food on their plate? Think of the starving children in Africa…right? Guilt, however, upsets digestion, which is why good Catholics confess and assure their absolution before communion. To suffer peptic trouble upon the ingestion of Jesus will simply not do just as grumpiness and guilt at the table turns even the healthiest food foul. What we want is for our children to appreciate their food, to feel the love we put into preparing it; the above refrain is useless to us then. So what is to be done? Perhaps, if we read into George Eliot’s wisdom, a subtext suggests we must find our own gratitude first and once back in that balm – for gratitude is just that, a balm – we can find the language or gesture to convey the feeling so that it is felt.
So here is one of my New Year’s resolutions, inspired directly from Middlemarch:
Put down the gavel and enter the Garden of Good Rapport.
The cow, bless her, judges not. She chews.