The Pier-Glass

An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent... 

(Middlemarch, chapter XXVII)

George Eliot's fine pier-glass metaphor is said to be one of the most famous in all literature. It's arguably the most famous passage in the novel (the one I mentioned in my previous post aside). Eliot, in short, extrapolates upon Middlemarch's driving theory of egoism, or the fact that each person's reality is illuminated as well as limited by his or her personal "lighted candle," slash world outlook. Our impressions of order, sense, or "concentric circles" in the world often derive from our own limitation of perspective; we can see only what our past and present experiences show us, and not the full arrangement of interactions, conversations, thoughts, hopes, and dreams that compose the events around us and the minds of the people we meet. In fact, the unknowability of other people's minds is one of Eliot's major themes and something that continually fascinates me.

Though this could arguably be a very troubling, atheistic outlook (and though, in Eliot's view, it certainly was), this image of the pier-glass has still resonated with me since the first time I read it during spring quarter of my freshman year. Since then, in several ways, I've seen how perspective is everything and how we really cannot escape from the light of our own egoism. Whole, composite reality is unknowable to us as a result of our human condition, though we often fool ourselves into believing that our immediate perceptions and beliefs are all there is. Not to toss too much literature into the mix, but this last sentence makes me think of a line from Robert Frost's poem "Two Look at Two":

One last look the way they must not go,
On up the failing path, where, if a stone
Or earthslide moved at night, it moved itself;
No footstep moved it. 'This is all,' they sighed,
Good-night to woods.' But not so; there was more...

"This, then, is all," we might say, but we continue to wander through dark spaces as we seek to illuminate them with the candle of our understanding (however imperfect). Of course it is never all. There is more ahead, on up the path, in our learning, or in the people we meet, and such a mindset of self-aware and self-critical exploration is one that I hope to embrace during my time at Oxford. I hold my own candle, with all its inherent quirks and limitations, yet I seek to use it to grasp the way of things as well as I can. Combined with the role Middlemarch played in my Rhodes interview, its standing in the English canon I plan to study, and (of course) its setting in England, this image of the pier-glass compels me to find and then write about whatever I see on the surface of my time abroad, with the awareness that I write thoroughly as myself and as only one mind among many.

(The above: my rough effort at articulating my blog's perhaps ridiculously allusive title.)