Previous - 164. The Road to Character
The Road to Character
For the second time in recent books, there's a chapter on George Eliot, who I've still never read. I keep forgetting that she translated Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity -- which I'm having trouble getting my hands on. Brooks is focusing in this chapter on love, and this time its romantic love.I'm just over half through the book and I'm already thinking I'm going to be very critical of his "Adam I and Adam II" thesis by the end, but I'm surprisingly impressed by his dissection, to borrow Tisdale's term, of romantic love. The joyful self-indulgence of pleasing the beloved is wonderfully described. And I can't help applying what he writes to Swann in love, where it fits perfectly. But when it comes to Marcel in love (with Albert/Albertine) Brooks's view falls short. And that kind of "lacerating" love is even more evident in The Brothers Karamazov, with that whole soap opera around Dmitri.
Brooks argues that, "...love open[s] up the facility for spiritual awareness. It is an altered state of consciousness..." similar to the mystical, religious love experienced by Zosima and anyone approaching death in The Brothers K. But this ignores the appeal suffering has for so many people, and not just in Russian novels. But the desire to feel deeply, regardless of the cost, is probably shared by both romantics and religious people, so Brooks is not entirely wrong.
p177 Eliot and Lewes run off to Europe together. Okay, what's curious here is that this sounds so much like Anna and Vronsky in Anna Karenina. Here Eliot is representing romantic love and all I can imagine is Dorothy Day screaming, "NO! Not Anna."
p183 Many of her characters... begin their adulthood with an ardent moral ambition. They want to achieve some great good, like a Saint Teresa, but they don't know what it is or what their vocation might be... Their attention is fixed on some pure ideal, some distant horizon. Eliot was a Victorian; she believed in moral improvement. But she used her novels to critique such lofty and otherworldly moral goals...
But Dorothy Day again...
I wonder if Brooks separated the chapters on Day and Eliot because he didn't want us to compare them or because he realized the reader would do all the work of comparing them in any case. If Day had written a novel about Eliot I have no doubt her character would have ended up under a train, just as Tolstoy dealt with Anna -- her brother, Oblonsky, was allowed to live because he had a wife to suffer in his place, I suppose.
I'm glad Brooks doesn't let us forget about Eliot's problem with depression, which never subsided even in her happy marriage. She sought solace in married love (such a strange notion) where Day threw herself into a "lacerating" faith. Eliot's "marriage" was a stunning success while Day's mirror image situation (her actual husband living with another woman) was a painful flop. Praise Jesus!
And I love that Eliot was translating Feuerbach while they were contemplating their break with propriety. Again, you couldn't make this shit up.
Random
Just now I was walking down the posh stretch of Grant street and noticed a gentleman enjoying Care in the Community. To be specific, he was engaging, through speech and gestures, with one of the manikins in a shop window. The Valentino shop, no less. As I approached I thought I would see a clerk inside -- perhaps in a shop like this they are called "brand representatives" -- but, no. It was just a manikin that had drawn the guys attention.I shouldn't be so quick to cast aspersions. Really to doubt someone's ability to interact successfully with the world. This week I've been conducting some financial maneuvers which, in a more gentile age, would have been conducted in a business-like office with me saying, "I wish to to this." And my distinguished agent saying, "Certainly. That transfer will be made by the end of the business day. Is there anything else?" But, of course we, or anyway I, don't live in such a gentile world. Instead I was on the phone with customer service representatives, and most of the time was spent with such agents walking me through online screens where you can quickly and easily perform mistakes that take days to set right.
On Tuesday I wanted to connect my brokerage IRA account with my bank. Instead, we transferred the funds to another account that was already linked to my bank. Focused on this task, and not having given the whole transaction a great deal of thought, I clicked through the options for withholding taxes on this distribution. By Wednesday I had realized my mistake and called in again to see if this could be edited/revised. No. All they could suggest was transferring the funds back where they started and then doing it all over.
This seemed stupid to me so I called the IRS to see about doing the withholding separately. There's probably a way to do this, but the process of finding it and then doing it was going to be worse than the brokerage do-over approach. So on Thursday I did that. Today, Friday, the funds had registered back in their original home account so I did the transfer again -- unassisted -- and now I'm finally in position to make the brokerage to bank transfer.
And that was just one transaction. I was closing out a second account at another fund which was not linked to my bank at all. Before I quite realized what the women on the phone was doing she processed the transaction with the funds to be mailed to me in the form of a check. The check arrived safely with yesterdays post, and I quickly walked it down to my neighborhood ATM and deposited it. No problem. But from the time I hung up with the customer service person and the time it arrived in the mail I worried about this large check sailing through the postal system. It was even larger than the mortgage deposit check I had, nervously, transported across town to the title company when I bought my condo. At these times I imagine myself with a sign on my back saying "Carrying thousands of dollars. Think of all the drugs you could buy if you robbed this clown."
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