The anguish must be borne
A letter of condolence from George Eliot
On this day in 1880, Mary Ann Evans died. Better known by her pen name, George Eliot, she was born in Nuneaton and is best known for writing Middlemarch, a novel often regarded as one of the greatest in the English language. In 1865, the young daughter of Caroline Bray, a close friend and fellow writer, died following a long illness. Some weeks later, Evans sent her this letter.
My dear Cara,
You see I have let the weeks go by—thinking of you, but not writing to you. I believe you are one of the few who can understand that in certain crises, direct expression of sympathy is the least possible to those who most feel sympathy. If I could have been with you in bodily presence, I should have sat silent, thinking silence a sign of feeling that speech, trying to be wise, must always spoil. The truest things one can say about great death are the oldest simplest things that everybody knows by rote, but that no one knows really till death has come very close. And when that inward teaching is going on, it seems pitiful presumption for those who are outside to be saying anything. There is no such thing as consolation, when we have made the lot of another our own as you did Nelly’s. The anguish must be borne—it will only get more and more bearable as other thoughts and feelings recover some power.
I don’t know whether you strongly share, as I do, the old belief that made men say the gods loved those who died young. It seems to me truer than ever, now life has become more complex and more and more difficult problems have to be worked out. Life, though a good to men on the whole, is a doubtful good to many, and to some not a good at all. To my thought, it is a source of constant mental distortion to make the denial of this a part of religion, to go on pretending things are better than they are.
But I will not write of judgments and opinions. What I want my letter to tell you is that I love you truly, gratefully, unchangeably. And to show me you believe it, you must not write till you feel inclined—not think I shall mind if you don’t answer this at all, for indeed there is nothing to answer.
With love to you, always, dear Cara, your old
Marian
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what a sensitive insightful soul miss Evans was.
After Death, despite all the talk, mourning, and remembering, the rest is silence.