The transformation of sorrow

I discovered today at work that I can no longer post on my own blog or read or post comments on other blogs. Sigh, I think it is the beginning of the end ...

Anyway, it's no secret that I am fan of George Eliot's novels, and her surpassing skill of perception. I ground to a halt trying to read Dickens' Bleak House this year, and have had my opinion somewhat affirmed in a comparison of Dickens and Eliot by Stephen Gill in which he writes: "That Dickens should be able to render 'with the utmost power the external traits of our town population' makes it all the more tragic that he should be so unable to depict 'their psychological character; their conceptions of life, and their emotions - with the same truth as their idiom and manners ...'." I'm not the person to criticise a master such as Dickens (though I did indeed get weary of his wordy descriptions of exteriors) and his art has its place no doubt, but Eliot is, to me, the master of inhabiting her characters and depicting their psychological character.

However, I was flicking through Adam Bede and found the following paragraph, wherein Eliot actually steps back into narrative, that I have decided to post:

For Adam, though you see him quite master of himself, working hard and delighting in his work after his inborn inalienable nature, had not outlived his sorrow - had not felt it slip from him as a temporary burthen, and leave him the same man again. Do any of us? God forbid. It would be a poor result of all our anguish and our wrestling, if we won nothing but our old selves at the end of it - if we could return to the same blind loves, the same self-confident blame, the same light thoughts of human suffering, the same frivolous gossip over blighted human lives, the same feeble sense of that Unknown towards which we have sent forth irrepressible cries in our loneliness. Let us rather be thankful that our sorrow lives in us as an indestructible force, only changing its form, as forces do, and passing from pain into sympathy - the one poor word which includes all our best insight and our best love. Not that this transformation of pain into sympathy had completely taken place in Adam yet: there was still a great remnant of pain, which he felt would subsist as long as her pain was not a memory, but an existing thing, which he must think of as renewed with the light of every new morning. But we get accustomed to mental as well as bodily pain, without, for all that, losing our sensibility to it: it becomes a habit of our lives, and we cease to imagine a condition of perfect ease as possible for us. Desire is chastened into submission; and we are contented with our day when we have been able to bear our grief in silence, and act as if we were not suffering. For it is at such periods that the sense of our lives having visible and invisible relations beyond any of which either our present or prospective self is the centre, grows like a muscle that we are obliged to lean on and exert.

I think that is just beautiful, and it calls to mind 2 Cor 1:3-11. On an essentially rather similar note, I read this post today, for those of us going home alone again this Christmas, which I found through this post.