In high school, with a brain battered by hormones, I labored through Silas Marner by George Eliot. It’s a small book, but at the time it seemed like a thousand pages of slogging through a swamp of words, every paragraph sucking at your feet. I found the book bleak and depressing, even though it is the morally uplifting story of a lonely, miserable, mean man who finds family, love and redemption through caring selflessly for a child, not his own.

But fifty years later, viewed with somewhat reduced hormones, here is George Eliot, in majestic prose, filled with ideas, setting the scene for the book:

It was still that glorious war-time which was felt to be a peculiar favour of Providence towards the landed interest, and the fall of prices had not yet come to carry the race of small squires and yeomen down that road to ruin for which extravagant habits and bad husbandry were plentifully anointing their wheels. I am speaking now in relation to Raveloe and the parishes that resembled it; for our old-fashioned country life had many different aspects, as all life must have when it is spread over a various surface, and breathed on variously by multitudinous currents, from the winds of heaven to the thoughts of men, which are for ever moving and crossing each other with incalculable results.

In other words, it seemed at first that the war was good for the landowners and farmers, but later it turned out that it wasn’t, because the squires spent money they didn’t have and the farmers were not very good farmers, and food prices crashed, and life is complicated and things are always changing. That’s what it says, but my literal version is not very elegant, is it? 

There are only two sentences in the paragraph. Mary Anne wielded the semicolon, as few of us now do. Because most of us write in short, choppy sentences, we tend to get lost in the long ones that characterized English prose for hundred of years. I don’t know if I am ever going to read all of Silas Marner again, but I am now grateful, after all these years, that a forgotten (at least by me) Chicago high school English teacher made me grumble my way through it. Great prose stays with you -- it teaches you what is possible, big thoughts expressed in a beautiful flow of language. 

“....from the winds of heaven to the thoughts of men, which are for ever moving and crossing each other with incalculable results.”