Vantage point

Rohan Maitzen writes,

"In contrast [to Jane Austen's heroines], as Virginia Woolf noted in her centennial essay on George Eliot in the TLS in 1919, Eliot’s heroines 'do not find what they seek':

The ancient consciousness of woman, charged with suffering and sensibility, and for so many ages dumb, seems in them to have brimmed and overflowed and uttered a demand for something — they scarcely know what — for something that is perhaps incompatible with the facts of human existence.

Her heroines end up at best ambivalently fulfilled, never triumphant... The result, for us, is an uncomfortable mental and emotional chafing: why isn’t a different, happier ending possible? what are the 'facts of human existence' that inhibit her protagonists’ desires, or ours for them? what must be done before the hoped-for happy ending can be wholly achieved and realistic? Where Austen offers us uncompromised satisfactions, that is, George Eliot insists on dissatisfaction..."--

***

At the little town library again for the afternoon. My computer is still infected and D has taken it into town to be fixed.

Am sitting at a southfacing multipaned window here, overlooking a snowy yard and steepled church. Quite a timeless view. I could be anywhere in New England, at anytime in the last 250 or so years. Tall bare trees at the back of the yard fan out against the white church and sky.

***
Reflections on a New Year's Revelation

"The first eclipse fell on December 31 in the United States... This first eclipse, a full moon lunar eclipse, will fall in Cancer, so your twelfth house will become activated. You may hear of a secret that someone has carefully kept hidden, or you may have a secret of your own that will come out in the open. The job of an eclipse is to make certain truths obvious, so when they do, it's always a revelation."

What does it mean when someone I once knew
has looked at my site dozens of times some days
(... so many hits - I do hope that's you -
I was at the library when I discovered this -
and when I saw all the hits
from who I imagined - hoped - was you -
I felt that I'd been struck by lightning...)
and most days lately since
checks in once or twice that I can tell
tipping his wings, as it were, like a hawk.
But I rarely hear from him and if I do
the comments are quite terse.
Well, I know he's busy.
But there's a contradiction there, it seems to me.
Or perhaps any number of his old flames have blogs
and I'm but one of his rounds?
That doesn't seem so likely
because although there are zillions of blogs
I doubt that so many, even of old flames,
possess a quality to hold his interest.
(Mine?)
Who is being flattered, him or me -
Is he greeting me in friendly daily fashion -
Is he flattered that he's a focus -
Or, at his everlasting remove - what?

What some women want and need
is not what human experience has to offer
I read this morning.
My blog is public, it's published
he has every right to check in on it
whenever he likes
& it doesn't necessarily mean very much at all.



images:
Henry Darvall, The Lady of Shalott , 1854
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, illustration for Tennyson's Lady of Shalott (wood engraving), 1857