It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are still alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger for them.
― George Eliot
On my 16-hour drive to northeastern Pennsylvania to attend a writing residency, I listened to half (yes, there are actually 32-hour Audible books!) of George Eliot’s novel, Middlemarch, a novel I’d read in graduate school when I was thrashing through one Victorian novel per week. At its heart is Dorothea Brooke, a woman who desires a life of more significance, a life in which her appetite for beautiful and good things would be sated. Early in the 880-page novel, Dorothea marries an older scholar, Edward Casaubon. Initially, she sees her marriage as the fulfillment of all she’s longed for, for she hopes to learn from her wise husband, to serve as his secretary, and thus, to contribute something intellectually meaningful to the world. In a short time, however, she discovers that she’s yoked herself to a man whose life’s work ultimately puddles into pathos. He suffers from fragile health, spends their honeymoon cloistered in a series of Roman archives, and, worst of all, shares little time, thought, or love with his new wife. It is not, sadly, a marriage made in heaven.
And yet, in her article, “Middlemarch and Me, What George Eliot teaches us” (Feb. 6, 2011, The New Yorker), Rebecca Mead explains how Dorothea defends her husband as she insists that [f]ailure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure. Mead argues that Dorothea promotes an idea central to much of Eliot’s work: that individuals must make their best efforts toward a worthy end, but it is the effort toward a goal, rather than the achievement of it, that makes us who we are.
Author Virginia Woolf believed Middlemarch to be one of the few English novels written for grown-up people, and Mead elaborates on this, claiming that it’s also a book about how to be a grownup person—about how to bear one’s share of sorrow, failure, and loss, as well as to enjoy moments of hard-won happiness. In youth, we tend to point our longing towards the future, believing–or at least hoping–that when we grow up, what we longed for will be realized. And though the act of longing isn’t the exclusive territory of grownups, it’s often felt most deeply as we age, as we realize how little time and how few opportunities to satisfy our longings remain.
But lest I lapse into maudelin musing, I have to say that hope and joy can live companionably with longing. In her novel, Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson writes:
To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing — the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, our very craving gives it back to us again.
I like the notion that our longing, our very craving for something might give it back to us again–or simply give it to us. In my father’s poem to mother, “On Your Birthday, Remember,” he writes that:
For some a remembered hand can be almost as real as any made of flesh and blood. Just so your hand in mine, brought back by love. Herein lies the sweet meat of longing: that your hand in mine might be brought back by love, that, as Robinson contends, to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. Miles away from my grandchildren, I long to sit with them on the screen porch. Today as I sit in my small room listening to the rain, this longing for their presence all but makes it so. In his 1941 sermon, "The Weight of Glory," theologian and writer, C. S. Lewis writes: The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited. Lewis writes of what we truly desire, the country we have never yet visited, a life and place beyond the temporal. And I take heart in his claims that the beautiful, good things we've discovered in books, art, and the natural world are but good images of our real desires; that it's the longing for these things that spiritually blesses us, reminding us that we're made for much more than this life and this world. For those of us, like Dorothea, who long to contribute something of significance and real value to the world, we might take heart in George Eliot's parting words from Middlemarch: 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. We may have lived largely hidden lives, may have yearned for so much more, but the growing good of the world is partly dependent upon us and our small contributions, upon the silvery threads of our longing which pull us along and point us toward home. Fawn, at Six Feet A rosebud of ache bruises the dawn as you call to your mother. Six feet from me, alone, you stand your ground, a silver tremor running along your back. Neither of us moves. Our shallow breathing worries the air between us, and the distance can’t find its voice. The pansies at our feet have fallen over the edge of the terrace, and their violet heads drowse on the grass below. But we don’t see them. We have eyes only for each other. Will you close the gap, gentling your busy tail, quieting the injured bird who lives in your throat? I imagine it so. For then I’d take you in my arms as the maple of your longing runs clear and sweet into the day. I’d breathe my finest words into your ear: all will be well. And when your mother stands— expectant—in the clearing beyond the gate, I’d set you right again and point your lovely ache toward home.
