Beautiful earth
The most solid comfort one can fall back upon is the thought that the business of one's life is to help in some small way to reduce the sum of ignorance, degradation and misery on the face of this beautiful earth.
George Eliot
When I was in High School we had to read a book for English class called the Mill on the Floss by George Eliot. It was as I recall one of those books that takes time to sink into your understanding the writing rich and full. But what escaped me at the time, though we were taught this all along, was that George Eliot was a woman Mary Ann Evans who had to use a masculine name to be published. This fact back then I just accepted. Things have changed.
Here is a paragraph from the Mill on the Floss:
"Life did change for Tom and Maggie; and yet they were not wrong in
believing that the thoughts and loves of these first years would always
make part of their lives. We could never have loved the earth so well
if we had had no child-hood in it, - if it were not the earth where
the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with
our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass - the same
hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows - the same redbreasts that we
used to call `God's birds' because they did no harm to the precious
crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is
known and loved because it is known? "
In the first quote of hers at the start of this musing you can see that there is a depth to her thinking and it is a real key to most all of her writing. She wanted to produce "something beautiful for God" as Mother Teresa of Calcutta wrote. Mary Ann Evans was willing to give up her own name to share with the world the writings and thinking that she had in her that had to be written.
She saw her writing as a gift to the beauty of the world.
What gift today will you be giving to the beauty of the world?
You have many.
God abide
Bobbie McGarey
@2004
Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth. . . . But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven. . . . For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Matthew 6:19-21
more about George Eliot http://www.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka/Eliot.html
George Eliot
When I was in High School we had to read a book for English class called the Mill on the Floss by George Eliot. It was as I recall one of those books that takes time to sink into your understanding the writing rich and full. But what escaped me at the time, though we were taught this all along, was that George Eliot was a woman Mary Ann Evans who had to use a masculine name to be published. This fact back then I just accepted. Things have changed.
Here is a paragraph from the Mill on the Floss:
"Life did change for Tom and Maggie; and yet they were not wrong in
believing that the thoughts and loves of these first years would always
make part of their lives. We could never have loved the earth so well
if we had had no child-hood in it, - if it were not the earth where
the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with
our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass - the same
hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows - the same redbreasts that we
used to call `God's birds' because they did no harm to the precious
crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is
known and loved because it is known? "
In the first quote of hers at the start of this musing you can see that there is a depth to her thinking and it is a real key to most all of her writing. She wanted to produce "something beautiful for God" as Mother Teresa of Calcutta wrote. Mary Ann Evans was willing to give up her own name to share with the world the writings and thinking that she had in her that had to be written.
She saw her writing as a gift to the beauty of the world.
What gift today will you be giving to the beauty of the world?
You have many.
God abide
Bobbie McGarey
@2004
Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth. . . . But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven. . . . For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Matthew 6:19-21
more about George Eliot http://www.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka/Eliot.html
posted by Bobbie Giltz McGarey at
9:19 AM
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