THE MILL ON THE FLOSS, PART 2

Update: Only on page 100 of 500, so I have some serious catch-up reading to do on the plane to Minnesota. On the plus side, I’m enjoying it much more than expected. My progress has only been impeded because of a heap of library books demanding urgent attention (due dates approaching, renewals maxed out). I read a nice little Connie Willis novella, Inside Job, and am hurtling through The Best American Travel Writing 2006—I’m a sucker for these annual anthologies, and am eternally annoyed that the Pasadena library doesn’t carry more of them (no Best American Science and Nature Writing, Best Food Writing, Best American Magazine Writing, or Best Crime Writing this year, boo!). Of course, I’ll have to clear my schedule come 2007, because my Reading Project list has ballooned to a whopping 20 volumes, most of which I’m quite excited to crack open. Unlike this year’s classics-heavy “homework reading,” it promises a lot of fun action, mystery, and humor, including works by Roald Dahl, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Patricia Highsmith, Arthur Conan Doyle, Shirley Jackson, and P.G. Wodehouse.

Anyway, I loved this passage on the heartbreak of childhood from TMotF:

Very trivial, perhaps, this anguish seems to weather-worn mortals who have to think of Christmas bills, dead loves, and broken friendships; but it was not less bitter to Maggie—perhaps it was even more bitter—than what we are fond of calling antithetically the real troubles of mature life. “Ah, my child, you will have real troubles to fret about by-and-by,” is the consolation we have almost all of us had administered to us in our childhood, and have repeated to other children since we have been grown up. We have all of us sobbed so piteously, standing with tiny bare legs above our little socks, when we lost sight of our mother or nurse in some strange place; but we can no longer recall the poignancy of that moment and weep over it, as we do over the remembered sufferings of five or ten years ago. Every one of those keen moments has left its trace, and lives in us still, but such traces have blent themselves irrecoverably with the firmer texture of our youth and manhood; and so it comes that we can look on at the troubles of our children with a smiling disbelief at the reality of their pain.

So true. Bonus points to ol’ George for the painfully sweet and precise “tiny bare legs above our little socks” detail. And also, using the odd verb form “blent.”