There’s been some discussion of the EA-esque themes in George Eliot’s ‘Middlemarch’ on the Forum (here and here). Various quotes from the novel seem as if they could work as readings. I’ll highlight just a few...
For a graduation, there’s this passage about pursuing knowledge/​learning/​education, not for its own sake, but to help us do good:
It would be a great mistake to suppose that Dorothea would have cared about any share in … learning as mere accomplishment; for though opinion … had pronounced her clever, that epithet would not have described her to circles in whose more precise vocabulary cleverness implies mere aptitude for knowing and doing, apart from character. All her eagerness for acquirement lay within that full current of sympathetic motive in which her ideas and impulses were habitually swept along. She did not want to deck herself with knowledge—to wear it loose from the nerves and blood that fed her action; and if she had written a book she must have done it as Saint Theresa did, under the command of an authority that constrained her conscience. But something she yearned for by which her life might be filled with action at once rational and ardent; and since the time was gone by for guiding visions and spiritual directors, since prayer heightened yearning but not instruction, what lamp was there but knowledge?
For a wedding, or a more general EA event:
What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult to each other?
This passage seems suited to a funeral, though could also be used more generally… it touches on the importance of shaping society to enable people to do good, as well as on celebrating the good we do manage to achieve, even if we don’t have as much impact as we might have liked:
Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and noble impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion. For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it. A new Theresa will hardly have the opportunity of reforming a conventual life, any more than a new Antigone will spend her heroic piety in daring all for the sake of a brother’s burial: the medium in which their ardent deeds took shape is forever gone. But we insignificant people with our daily words and acts are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some of which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that of the Dorothea whose story we know.
Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
There’s been some discussion of the EA-esque themes in George Eliot’s ‘Middlemarch’ on the Forum (here and here). Various quotes from the novel seem as if they could work as readings. I’ll highlight just a few...
For a graduation, there’s this passage about pursuing knowledge/​learning/​education, not for its own sake, but to help us do good:
For a wedding, or a more general EA event:
This passage seems suited to a funeral, though could also be used more generally… it touches on the importance of shaping society to enable people to do good, as well as on celebrating the good we do manage to achieve, even if we don’t have as much impact as we might have liked: