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Randolf & Rustin
George Eliot
The notable thing about this chapter, as I noted before, is Brooks's description of romantic love. Here's the key passage again,
p173 ...love opens up the facility for spiritual awareness. It is an altered stated of consciousness that is intense and overwhelming but at the same time effervescent. In that state, many people are likely to have mystical moments when they feel an awareness of some wordless mystery beyond the human plane. Their love gives them little glimmerings of pure love, love detached from this or that particular person but emanating from some transcendent realm...
This is the subjective experience of love, but an objective description would have to include the chemistry going on in the brain. The way our conscious self is being manipulated by the bodily OS that has it's own agenda. As I'm sure I've said before, I'm not doubting that you can spot your "soul mate" on the other side of a crowded dance floor, I'm merely questioning the objective nature of this "true love" that can be established with so little information being transmitted.
Now if, as Brooks is suggesting here, the most spiritual, pure love, aspect of religion is inspired by the effect of neuro-chemistry intended to get us to breed with appropriate mates, that is interesting. This puts my endorphin dependent capsaicin addiction in the shade. No wonder people find this aspect of religion both attractive and hard to give up.
Though with that in mind, it is odd that George Eliot abandoned religion for intellectual reasons. And at a time when you would have thought she would have been most sensitive to the consolations it brought.
I don't think Brooks intended this, but he includes a passage that may be the perfect indication of true love,
p179 ... One morning... [before Mary Anne became George] she was fantasizing about writing fiction when a title popped into her hear: The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton. Lewes was immediately enthusiastic. "Oh what a capital title!" he blurted.
And apropos of nothing, there's this about their mostly happy life together,
p180 ...Their frequent periods of ill health and depression were marked by migraines and dizzy spells...
Knowing what we do now of the toxic -- actually poisonous -- character of Victorian paints and wallpapers and the like, one wonders to what extent they were poisoned by their environment.
p183 ...The best reform... is tied to the here and now, directed by honest feelings for this or that individual rather than for humanity as a whole. There's power in the particular and suspicion of the general. For Eliot, holiness isn't in the next world but is embedded in a mundane thing like a marriage, which ties one down but gives one concrete and daily opportunities for self-sacrifice and service. Holiness is inspired by work, the daily task of doing some job well...
p184 There are limits, she teaches, in how much we can change other people or how quickly we can change ourselves. So much of life is lived in a state of tolerance -- tolerating other people's weaknesses and our own sins... "These fellow mortals, every one," she wrote in Adam Bede, "must be accepted as they are: you can neither straighten their noses nor brighten their wit nor rectify their dispositions; and it is these people -- amongst whom your life is passed -- that it is needful you should tolerate, pity, and love: it is these more or less ugly, stupid, inconsistent people whose movement of goodness you should be able to admire -- for whom you should cherish all possible hopes, all possible patience." This posture is at the essence of her morality... She loved but she also judged.
It's perfect for where I want to go with this, that Adam Bede was published in 1859, two years before the start of the American Civil War. You can see something of Eliot's "morality" in the position of the Methodist church in the American South. Miss Rosa's father may have been right (along with the Methodist church in the North), but can you reasonably expect average people to transcend their own context and see the immorality of the neighborhood culture they grew up with?
And if we agree with the position Brooks attributes to Southern blacks during the Civil Rights movement -- that despite the hopes of Liberal Northerners, education and PR is not going to kumbaya racists into changing their colors -- then how do you get people to change? Force doesn't work, Southerners doubled-down after they lost the War of Northern Aggression and we got the KKK and Jim Crow laws. Maybe some brilliantly devious person could have united the White and Black Southern churches is a holly war against Jews or Catholics. Brought together at last under a banner of hate. It would almost be worth the carnage.
p173 ...love opens up the facility for spiritual awareness. It is an altered stated of consciousness that is intense and overwhelming but at the same time effervescent. In that state, many people are likely to have mystical moments when they feel an awareness of some wordless mystery beyond the human plane. Their love gives them little glimmerings of pure love, love detached from this or that particular person but emanating from some transcendent realm...
This is the subjective experience of love, but an objective description would have to include the chemistry going on in the brain. The way our conscious self is being manipulated by the bodily OS that has it's own agenda. As I'm sure I've said before, I'm not doubting that you can spot your "soul mate" on the other side of a crowded dance floor, I'm merely questioning the objective nature of this "true love" that can be established with so little information being transmitted.
Now if, as Brooks is suggesting here, the most spiritual, pure love, aspect of religion is inspired by the effect of neuro-chemistry intended to get us to breed with appropriate mates, that is interesting. This puts my endorphin dependent capsaicin addiction in the shade. No wonder people find this aspect of religion both attractive and hard to give up.
Though with that in mind, it is odd that George Eliot abandoned religion for intellectual reasons. And at a time when you would have thought she would have been most sensitive to the consolations it brought.
I don't think Brooks intended this, but he includes a passage that may be the perfect indication of true love,
p179 ... One morning... [before Mary Anne became George] she was fantasizing about writing fiction when a title popped into her hear: The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton. Lewes was immediately enthusiastic. "Oh what a capital title!" he blurted.
And apropos of nothing, there's this about their mostly happy life together,
p180 ...Their frequent periods of ill health and depression were marked by migraines and dizzy spells...
Knowing what we do now of the toxic -- actually poisonous -- character of Victorian paints and wallpapers and the like, one wonders to what extent they were poisoned by their environment.
p183 ...The best reform... is tied to the here and now, directed by honest feelings for this or that individual rather than for humanity as a whole. There's power in the particular and suspicion of the general. For Eliot, holiness isn't in the next world but is embedded in a mundane thing like a marriage, which ties one down but gives one concrete and daily opportunities for self-sacrifice and service. Holiness is inspired by work, the daily task of doing some job well...
p184 There are limits, she teaches, in how much we can change other people or how quickly we can change ourselves. So much of life is lived in a state of tolerance -- tolerating other people's weaknesses and our own sins... "These fellow mortals, every one," she wrote in Adam Bede, "must be accepted as they are: you can neither straighten their noses nor brighten their wit nor rectify their dispositions; and it is these people -- amongst whom your life is passed -- that it is needful you should tolerate, pity, and love: it is these more or less ugly, stupid, inconsistent people whose movement of goodness you should be able to admire -- for whom you should cherish all possible hopes, all possible patience." This posture is at the essence of her morality... She loved but she also judged.
It's perfect for where I want to go with this, that Adam Bede was published in 1859, two years before the start of the American Civil War. You can see something of Eliot's "morality" in the position of the Methodist church in the American South. Miss Rosa's father may have been right (along with the Methodist church in the North), but can you reasonably expect average people to transcend their own context and see the immorality of the neighborhood culture they grew up with?
And if we agree with the position Brooks attributes to Southern blacks during the Civil Rights movement -- that despite the hopes of Liberal Northerners, education and PR is not going to kumbaya racists into changing their colors -- then how do you get people to change? Force doesn't work, Southerners doubled-down after they lost the War of Northern Aggression and we got the KKK and Jim Crow laws. Maybe some brilliantly devious person could have united the White and Black Southern churches is a holly war against Jews or Catholics. Brought together at last under a banner of hate. It would almost be worth the carnage.
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