Well Wadded

I carry around a low, steady guilt about not noticing people enough. Not the dramatic failures, which at least announce themselves, but the ordinary ones: everyone I pass has a whole life going on in there, and I take in roughly none of it. My working assumption has been that a better person would take in much more, and that my job is to turn the dial up. How far up, I have never asked. All the way, presumably.

Chapter 20 of Middlemarch asks for me. Dorothea, newly Mrs. Casaubon, is found "in a fit of weeping six weeks after her wedding," and the narrator stops to consider whether anyone will think this matters. She doubts it. "Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual," and what is common does not move us. Then she goes a step further than I expected: "That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it."¹² And then the sentence I had half heard of without knowing where it lived. "If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity."¹²

Plainly, then: the narrator says that ordinary sorrow is tragic precisely because there is so much of it; that we mostly fail to feel this; and that if we did feel all of it, it would destroy us. Silence is not the absence of suffering. It is what the suffering sounds like through the wadding. I say "the narrator" on purpose: this is the voice that tells the story, not a signed statement from George Eliot, though I find them hard to keep apart.¹²

Here is where I have to watch myself, because my first response was relief. The dial cannot go all the way up. Nobody's can. My inattention is not a moral failure; it is a load-bearing wall. That is a very comfortable thing to have concluded, and the comfort lasted until I looked again at the noun. She does not say we are wadded with prudence, or with healthy limits. She says stupidity, and she says it of "the quickest of us," which I take to include herself and to leave me no higher ground to stand on. The wadding may be necessary. She declines to call it a virtue.¹² I am also unsure of the tone. "We should die of that roar" is an extravagant thing to say, and it may be partly a joke at the expense of people who imagine they would like to feel everything. What I can't get around is where the sentence sits. It comes in the middle of a chapter that is doing the very thing it says we can't do, making me attend to one unremarkable young woman crying in a rented room. Not all ordinary human life. One piece of it, for a few pages.¹²

So I think my question was the wrong size. I had been asking how to hear everything, and feeling guilty that I couldn't, which cost nothing and helped no one. The passage seems to allow a smaller one: where, today, is the wadding thinner than it needs to be, and for whom could I take a little out? I don't know whether that is what the narrator means. I notice it is at least a question I could fail at in a specific way, which is more than I could say for the last one.¹²