![]() ![]() She had little self-assertion her aim was always to show her friends off to the best advantage - not herself. I consider her the most delightful companion I have ever known: she knew everything. In George Eliot: Interviews and Recollections ( public library), the famed British ribbon manufacturer and social reformer Charles Bray reflects on his nine years of close friendship with George Eliot, in whom he saw the same kind of generosity of spirit that Susan Sontag did in Borges. Eliot, despite her undeniable intellect, was no exception to this frailty of the human condition. In our chronic discomfort with ambiguity and with the fluid nature of our character, we often yearn to anchor ourselves in something concretizing by seeking out answers from outside ourselves to tell us who we are. Learning how to be happy, of course, is predicated on first learning how to be - a journey of self-knowledge and self-awareness that is sometimes disorienting, frequently uncertain, and always evolving. “One has to spend so many years in learning how to be happy,” Mary Ann Evans, better-known as George Eliot, wrote in a letter to a friend in 1844. ![]()
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