kallisti

"Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of a young and noble impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion." --Middlemarch

You could say, as many do, that the majority of discontent in this world is self-inflicted. And it isn't simply the hackneyed concept of pain and pleasure as intertwined, but the recognition that the pursuit of love and happiness involves a certain amount of "discord" within ourselves, as well as those necessary illusions we maintain in order to keep ourselves going. For example, why does Miss Bingley push Darcy to admit information that could harm none other than herself? The evidence is all there. She knows he is interested in Elizabeth--she's witnessed it all firsthand--and her triumph in successfully persuading him to admit it is dampened, ultimately, by the (reader's) realization that some information is perhaps better kept secret.

This is perhaps why Eliot uses the phrase "ideally beautiful," because those acts, in their own tragic way, maintain a kind of loveliness that is inconceivable within what we imagine as ideal, or what should happen. Still, where exactly is the line between faith and illusion, and how can we have the first without dabbling into the second?

In youth, illusions are so necessary. Sometimes I catch myself thinking, "Oh, these high school kids are so naive," but thinking back, I realize that the majority of mistakes I made weren't merely the result of ignorance, but of simply not caring. I know I knew better, I had to, but the stakes were never high enough for me to pause, reassess, and dispel those false hopes I had worked so hard to maintain. Because once they're gone they're gone. You mourn the passing, but if it was intangible and unreal to begin with, then the loss, too, is smaller than it seems.

I just noticed how disconnected and incoherent this post is--a result of digging up an old draft from a few weeks ago and trying to recreate what I was thinking at the moment, which usually doesn't work too well. It feels as if I'm trying to translate myself, and not doing a very good job at it. My point is, I guess, that it's possible to be an optimist without being an idiot, or to be a dreamer with both feet on the ground. I don't think this is what either Eliot or Austen was trying to say, but they remind me of the dangers of knowing too much, or trying too hard to keep ourselves illusion-free and grounded in reality--which is sometimes, as we find often too late, not really what we wanted at all.