Changing My Mind by Zadie Smith Read Free Book Online Page B

philosophical expression of her own experiences:
    Indeed, the human body is composed of a great many parts of different natures, which require continuous and varied food, so that the whole body may be capable of doing everything which can follow from its nature, and consequently, so that the mind may also be equally capable of conceiving many things.
    In her intellectual and personal life, Eliot demanded continuous and varied food—and she conceived of many things. One of these things was Fred Vincy, a commonplace young man who would seem more suited to a penny-farthing romance. But it’s worth looking again at the facts, which means, in the world of Middlemarch, the emotional facts. Fred is in love with a good girl, a girl who does not love him because he is not worthy; Fred agrees with her. Maybe the point is this: of all the people striving in Middlemarch, only Fred is striving for a thing worth striving for. Dorothea mistakes Causabon terribly, as Lydgate mistakes Rosamund, but Fred thinks Mary is worth having, that she is probably a good in the world, or at least, good for him (“She is the best girl I know!”)—and he’s right. Of all of them Fred has neither chosen a chimerical good nor radically mistaken his own nature. He’s not as dim as he seems. He doesn’t idealize his good as Dorothea does when she imagines Causabon a second Milton, and he doesn’t settle on a good a priori, like Lydgate, who has long believed that a doting, mindless girl is just what a man of science needs. What Fred surmises of the good he stumbles upon almost by accident, and only as a consequence of being fully in life and around life, by being open to its vagaries simply because he is in possession of no theory to impose upon it. In many ways bumbling Fred is Eliot’s ideal Spinozian subject. Here is Gilles Deleuze on Spinoza’s wise man; he could just as well be speaking of Fred:
    That is why Spinoza calls out to us in the way he does: you do not know beforehand what good or bad you are capable of; you do not know beforehand what a body or mind can do, in a given encounter, a given arrangement, a given combination.
    Fred has no idea what he is capable of. His moral luck is all encounter, arrangement, combination. Mary Garth is that encounter; she is Fred’s reason to be good. It is through her, and for her, that he is able to change:
    Even much stronger mortals than Fred Vincy hold half their rectitude in the being they love best. “The theatre of all my actions is fallen,” said an antique personage when his chief friend was dead; and they are fortunate who get a theatre where the audience demands their best. Certainly it would have made a considerable difference to Fred at that time if Mary Garth had had no decided notions as to what was admirable in character.
    Simply put, if Fred didn’t love Mary, he’d be half the man he is (and Fred is also the occasion to soften some of Mary’s hard dogmatic edges, for it surprises her, too, that she could love someone like Fred). And the rigors of love combine with other duties and redouble themselves. Because Fred loves Mary, when he recklessly borrows money from her family and is unable to pay it back, he finds the weight of his misdeed surprisingly heavy upon him. This is not biblical morality but practical morality: Fred has done something wrong in the world, and his true punishment lies not in the next world but in this one. It’s in the pain he has caused:
    Curiously enough, his pain in the affair beforehand had consisted almost entirely in the sense that he must have been dishonourable, and sink in the opinion of the Garths: he had not occupied himself with the inconvenience and possible injury that his breach might occasion them, for this exercise of the imagination on other people’s needs is not common with hopeful young gentlemen. Indeed we are most of us brought up in the notion that the highest motive for not doing a wrong is something irrespective of the beings who