How Do You Live in Darkness?

Well, you don't, as Charlotte finally opens her Moor-mangled and stunted heart to real Life and goes gently into that dark night. You don't live with it, you wrestle with it, hide from it, fear & loathe it, and to escape its grip even for a moment is, Miss George Eliot, how you end a book. As Morgan notes, there is a contract implied between the reader and the author, an obligation of the latter. Eventually you have to give the reader some light, some air to breathe and I ponder this as I finish the book and watch my cat on the balcony at midnight as the Florida air allows the Bay breezes to infiltrate the mugginess. This is how you get through the day.

Unsystematic Ruggedness

" ...all this ruggedness is unsystematic. ...It needs folding up and compressing-say into the size of a garden plot. Then you could get your inspiriting ruggedness all in one dose, without having to go to a lot of trouble and tire yourself out," so says the new curate of the Bronte's father, when he might well of been speaking of Emily, Charlotte and Anne themselves rather than of the moors. For they sprawl throughout the book, brilliantly longing for the worlds in books they've grown abnormally attached to. It can't end well, one thinks. But, though tired of the endless journey, one continues trudging across the desolate lands with them, waiting for a break, anything. When the brother, upon of course the weight of all their futures is borne, begins sipping laudanum, even the most crumpled of wind-blown trees seems to shrink somehow more.