flâneur

the weight of ordinary lives - Chandhana's Marginalia

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hearing the grass grow in middlemarch

Middlemarch drew me into the minds of others, both within and beyond the book. By revealing the full complexity of others’ lives, the novel teaches us to recognise that the world is sustained by countless acts of care. It began when I was working through Wilson Library’s Eliot collection while close reading Middlemarch, where I discovered an excerpt from a DiPhi speech Samuel Watson Reaves wrote in 1898. He was a math student at UNC Chapel Hill, reading the same texts as I was--Middlemarch, and likely also a differential equation textbook. Reading his speech felt less like encountering a…

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