Finding the Foundress of Nothing

The relief of letting go

Each night at around eight-thirty, we begin to discuss the final movements of our day. They are conversations, which for reasons I don’t fully understand, remain of perennial interest to us no matter how many times we’ve had it during our twenty-odd years together.

It’s truly top of mind. We start by playing a round of verbal thumb wars, the winner declaring who gets first dibs on the bathroom to “scrub the choppers,” as Kevin says, during which the defeated loser is relegated to shutting the lights off, double-checking the doors, and feeding the cat before heading upstairs.

Lately, though, after we’ve both had our last-call bathroom shift, after we are sufficiently stretched and tucked in, we take turns reading aloud a chapter from Middlemarch, George Eliot’s extremely verbose, extremely miraculous rendering of small-town English life as it was in the mid-1800s.

Middlemarch, short for Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, is regularly listed among books you should read before you die. Longtime New Yorker contributor Rebecca Mead wrote an entire book, My Life in Middlemarch, about her lifelong relationship with Eliot’s sprawling tome and wrote a compelling foreword for Penguin’s latest edition. What Mead saw when she read the book was depictions of her own experiences…