Tag Archives: Daniel Deronda

George Eliot and Gary Larson Knew Something About Life

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From The Far Side, by the consistently brilliant Gary Larson:

From Daniel Deronda, by the often brilliant George Eliot:

[Note: Daniel is now immersed in the the question whether a Jewish state should be established (the novel is set around 1875). Gwendolen has married a controlling, unlovable aristocrat.] 

“And Gwendolen? She was thinking of Deronda much more than he was thinking of her — often wondering what were his ideas ‘about things’, and how his life was occupied.

But … it was as far from Gwendolen’s conception that Deronda’s life could be determined by the historical destiny of the Jews, as that he could rise into the air on a brazen horse, and so vanish from her horizon in the form of a twinkling star.

With all the sense of inferiority that had been forced upon her, it was inevitable that she should imagine a larger place for herself in his thoughts than she actually possessed. They must be rather old and wise persons who are not apt to see their own anxiety or elation about themselves reflected in other minds.”

How often are relationships symmetrical? Is it even a goal worth seeking? Maybe it’s a cosmic joke.

Is it too cynical to believe that we only become old and wise after it hardly matters?

Worlds Upon Worlds, According to George Eliot

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Coincidentally, after writing this morning about the great philosopher David Lewis’s strange position concerning possible worlds, I read the following in George Eliot’s novel Daniel Deronda:

“Suppose he had introduced himself as one of the strictest reasoners. Do they form a body of men hitherto free from false conclusions and illusory speculations? The driest argument has its hallucinations, too hastily concluding that its net will now at last be large enough to hold the universe. Men may dream in demonstrations, and cut out an illusory world in the shape of axioms, definitions and propositions, with a final exclusion of fact signed Q.E.D. No formulas for thinking will save us mortals from mistake in our imperfect apprehension of the matter to be thought about….the unemotional intellect may carry us into a mathematical dreamland where nothing is but what is not….”

Eliot (born Mary Anne Evans) was no mean philosopher herself. And she could certainly turn a phrase.