I finished Middlemarch this morning. Here’s the final paragraph (I don’t think this is a spoiler, but if you’re spoilerphobic you can just skip to my thoughts afterward):
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.
I can’t say whether this last paragraph carries the same weight without the 840 pages before it, but it made me cry. I think a lot about whether I’m having any effect on the world around me, and whether my actions will remembered or even noticed. This paragraph suggests that we influence people around us in ways we often can’t see, and the association of those effects with our name is much less important than the pure fact that they happen. To do the work of living well – meaning to be a positive force in whatever part of the world we happen to inhabit – is the point. It is all that is worth aspiring to.
Comments