The Fragility of Life

                                                    Life’s Fragility

A frightened teenager with tender pink skin lies on a gurney as his father caresses his hair.

An elderly woman enters. She is coughing blood, this ominous symptom giving her terror.

Parents clutching feverish and crying babies. Homeless men,

Either drunk or disoriented or both, crying for attention.

The nurses tend to them. Friendly yet detached, warm yet indifferent, fulfilling their role

Helping people when they are at their most vulnerable,

When they are afraid of death, afraid of a life that is so fragile,

A fragility that is often ignored or forgotten, and difficult to reconcile,

With life’s delights. Until one, inevitably, finds himself in the sterilized confinement of the emergency room,

Surrounded by the sick and needy, impatient to leave the hospital, impatient to resume

Their fragile lives

This was inspired by my visit to the hospital emergency room in Toronto last week. I was there because I fell off my bike: as I was cycling across an intersection that was full of streetcar tracks, my front tire got caught in one of them and I lost control, impacting the cold hard pavement while onlookers stared, wondering whether I was seriously injured. It turns out that I was not. I got up immediately, picked up my damaged bike and took it to the sidewalk. The elbow and knee on the right side of my body were bloodied, and although I could walk, I felt a piercing pain on my right hip and in my right-side rib cage. Luckily, I was about 100 meters from St. Joseph’s hospital. I walked over to the emergency room to get checked out, and it turns out that I broke a rib. My first question to the doctor was: could I continue to cycle? He said yes, but that I should be more careful. My next question was: could I continue my hip hop dance lessons? He said of course because I am in good shape.

The experience was and is painful. Certain movements and activities, like lying down or laughing, hurt. But it was also very positive for several reasons. First, it forced me to rethink my capacity as a cyclist. I have been an avid bike-rider for almost three decades, and in that time period I have developed a certain talent, the kind that comes whenever one repeatedly practises something. The knowledge of this talent made me overconfident, and falling and breaking my rib has taught me that I have a lot to learn. No matter how good I get, there will always be that unforeseen circumstance that happens when one least expects it. Now, I am hyper aware whenever I cross streetcar tracks, and this awareness will likely prevent that kind of accident from ever happening again, but who knows? Lurking silently around the corner of some other street might be some other known-unknown that will make me vulnerable to another bike accident.

Mostly importantly was the reminder of how fragile life is. One moment I was cycling down Queen Street, full of energy and life and potential and optimism, and the next moment I was lying bloodied and broken on the street, and in need of the help of medical doctors who thankfully were but a short distance away. It was a metaphor of this strange life that we find ourselves in, where one wrong turn, or a miscalculation, or one momentary distraction can lead even the strongest among us lying helpless and in need of assistance. My strong impression of life’s fragility was reinforced when I entered the emergency room. While I was groaning in pain and impatiently waiting to be attended to, I closely observed the people coming in, some of whom are mentioned in the poem above. A young man, no older than 19 or 20, comes in shaking and crying and complaining of severe chest pain. He probably believed he was dying of a heart attack, although most likely he was suffering from severe anxiety. And then an elderly woman comes in coughing blood into a rag. I listened as the nurse asked her questions: “do you have a history of tuberculosis? Do you have cancer?” “Not that I know of,” answered the elderly lady. For all I know, she may have been diagnosed with cancer or something serious shortly after she was taken to speak to a doctor.

The knowledge of life’s fragility is unnerving, but it is also a salutary reminder that tomorrow is not guaranteed to anyone. This induces a kind of existential humility about the universe and one’s place in it. It encourages one to treasure the things that matter, such as love, and recognize that the things that we often strive for—material gain, status, and prestige—are ultimately irrelevant. It helps one to be grateful to be alive, to have a sensory apparatus to perceive, a mind to think, and people to care for. Funny how it takes a biking accident to become vividly conscious of that.

The Interconnections Between Property, Love and Power (a book review of George Eliot's "Middlemarch")

George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” is a book about the web of relationships in an eponymously named town in early nineteenth century England, when many significant and long-lasting social and political changes were taking place, such as the abolition of slavery and the granting of the franchise to men without property. These political changes play a significant role in the book, and for good reason: George Eliot (her real name is Mary Evans) was a feminist who promoted many of the progressive causes of that time (although some of her observations would anger contemporary feminists; more on that below). It was also a time of the flourishing of science and the decline of religious belief among elites, and Middlemarch nicely captures those cultural changes in many of the characters, like Dr. Lydgate, who represent the archetype of the hero of science: irreligious, determined to expend most of their time and effort to reveal the secrets of the material universe even if it costs them their careers, families, and other petty pleasures that average people pursue.

These cultural and political layers are the background to the more important part of the book, that which forms the substance, the crux, the issues that take up most of the space and analysis: romantic love and the way it manifested itself within the constraints in that time period. These constraints were experienced by both men and women. For the latter, the fact of essentially being property of the father or brother meant that for a love to be consummated in a way that ensured a good standing in the community, the male members of the family had to give their consent. This clearly limited the woman’s options; a dalliance or love affair would be difficult if the father or patron of the household objected. On this basis, it would be easy to assume that men had more freedom in romantic love, but this is only superficially true. In order for a man to get the woman he loved (in the sense of getting both her and her fathers’ consent) he would have to have property, and this obviously constrained the many men who either did not have the privilege of being born into wealth or who did not have some aristocratic lineage.

The interconnections between property, love, and marriage are Eliot’s way, I would argue, of highlighting how so many relationships depend on factors that are mostly outside our control. We see this, to some extent or another, in most of the main romances in the book—Dorothea and Casaubon, Dorothea and Ladislaw, Fred and Mary, Celia and James, and Rosamond and Lydgate. All of these relationships either begin with the promise of property, are impeded because of the absence of property, or deteriorate because the expectations of property are not met. Take Dorothea and Casaubon. She falls in love with him because he has the knowledge that she wants, and because she wants to be of service to his scholarly and religious inclinations. This happens despite the fact that they are a poor match: she is young and desirous of a vibrant emotional life, and he is old, apathetic, and emotionally detached. This mismatch would not have happened had Mr. Casaubon not inherited wealth that allowed him to pursue his ultimately fruitless scholarly ambitions while supporting a wife. After the pathetic Mr. Casaubon dies, Dorothea and Ladislaw fall in love, and their union is nearly scuttled precisely because Ladislaw does not have any property. In a similar vein, the vain Rosamond falls in love with Lydgate partly because of her wish to connect with his aristocratic lineage. She has expectations of endlessly frolicking with barons and others with fancy titles while servants meet her every need, and these romanticized beliefs help her to overlook the fact that Lydgate is what today might be called a “starving artist”, even though he was a medical doctor trained in Paris (evidently being a physician in George Eliot’s time was not as remunerative as it is now).

Of course property, lineage, and wealth are not the main aspects of the relationships in the book. More importantly are the emotional dimensions of courtship, love, and union. Eliot is at her best when she recounts the internal dialogues and associated subjective impressions that are experienced when falling in love, an experience that was aptly described elsewhere as coming and going “independently of the will”. The character of Dorothea nicely embodies this. She first falls in love with Mr. Casaubon, but it was the naïve type of love that anybody over 25 would recognize, based on a highly misleading reading of the beloved by “filling in the blanks with unmanifested perfections”. It was a love that flowed from two aspects of her personality: the classical love of knowledge and the Christian spirit of self-sacrificial service to humanity. Mr. Casaubon, described above, seemed to have the qualities that would have allowed these noble motives to flourish, but her desires clouded her judgement, ultimately leading to an unhappy marriage with someone whose true character is revealed only when it is too late. After he passes away, Dorothea and Ladislaw fall in love, and their budding romance is one of the most interesting parts of the book. Her feelings for Ladislaw begin with friendship and outrage at the unfairness of the injustice that happened to him: he was denied his family’s property only because his mother fell in love with and married a poor Polish Jew. Dorothea aims to correct this injustice by appealing to Mr Casaubon, who is Ladislaw’s cousin, to give the latter his share of the property that he inherited. Mr. Casaubon, correctly suspicious of the germinating romance between them, refuses, and out of pure spite writes in his will that, upon his death, Dorothea would not inherit his property if she married Ladislaw. But her feelings of warmth and caring and love for Ladislaw overcome this attempt by Mr. Casaubon to prevent their union. Initially, she is not aware of her love for him. She only knows that she cares for him, and misses him when he is not around. Her love for him only registers when her heart starts palpitating violently when she overhears that Ladislaw might be in love with another; it is the feeling of jealousy—an emotion that is seemingly so contrary to Dorothea’s pure and untainted soul—that makes it clear to her that she loves him. Ladislaw’s love for Dorothea is also beautifully recounted, as in the scene when Rosamond berates him because of his preference for Dorothea, and he angrily replies “I never had any preference for her any more than I had a preference for breathing!”

But I digress. Eliot promoted women’s rights and other progressive causes but there are passages in the text that would anger many contemporary feminists. Notable in this regard is when she says that women “enslave” men and “conquer” them even when they are married, and that men are the “subjects” of women (subjects require rulers, and the obvious implication is that women are the rulers). This asymmetric power relationship between the sexes plays itself out most vividly in the marriage between Rosamond and Lydgate. His whole raison d’etre seems to be the futile attempt to please her, and his failure to do so creates misery and despair that undermines his true vocation to be the heroic scientist. When he encounters financial difficulty, the most logical response is to reduce their standard of living until things improve, but Rosamond would have none of it. She betrays him several times, and although he gets upset, it does not in any way undermine his wish to make her happy. This poor soul—perhaps unsurprisingly—meets a tragic end, dying young of disease while Rosamond, shortly after, marries a wealthy and older aristocrat who can meet her seemingly inexhaustible needs.  What Eliot is saying here, I think, is her belief in the capacity of romantic love to metaphorically enslave men, and that this power can be more meaningful in people’s lives than the political and social power that comes from having equal rights. That Eliot, a progressive female intellectual, would imply such a thing would jar the nerves of many. My precocious 14 year old daughter, for example, is a committed feminist and would probably be outraged at the idea that women of the early 19^th century were anything but oppressed chattel under the yoke of male dominated social structures. This theme of the disparate and perhaps conflicting power relations in the romantic sphere versus the political and social habitat is too complex to address here; suffice to say that some of the observations in Middlemarch on the subject give a lot to chew on.

My version of Middlemarch is 800 pages—hardly the stuff of easy beach reading. But the time and effort required to get through the text is worth it, and the book deserves its status as a classic. There are many layers of meaning that will satiate the intellectually hungry soul—political, scientific, social, and romantic. What is more, George Eliot does this with prose that is deeply nuanced, entertaining, and page turning, making the reader hungry for more, especially as the book progresses. Once one really gets into the lives of the characters, it is hard to not want to taste what comes next, and what does happen is a delightfully sweet exposition of the human heart and the way it is constrained by social and political factors outside its control. But those with a stomach for drama will not be disappointed, as the book ultimately quenches the thirst for a happy ending.