Literal and Social Order

As is perhaps to be expected, I did not do any of the educational things I suggested yesterday. Instead I sorted through all sorts of games -- at least 15 ice cream buckets' worth. It's a long and quiet process, with some nice discoveries here and there (games I remember from my earliest childhood), but with a lot of dust, rusty spark plugs, and one particularly nasty sticky black substance. That substance, incidentally, came from a corner in which there were several batteries; I keep on worrying that I will come into contact with battery acid, so I was not very happy. Also, the batteries can't just be thrown into the garbage, but must be disposed of separately. This may be the beginning of a lifelong dislike of batteries. Either way, it feels good to throw away -- among many other things -- old playing cards, and broken toy guns (which I don't like anyway).

The flea market will start at 9:00 tomorrow morning. I'm not exactly looking forward to waking up so early, but since there isn't any Daily Show or Colbert Report on Friday, I'll gladly go to sleep early today. I'll ask if I can borrow my sister's alarm clock. The only thing I really worry about in connection with the market is how I will make up my mind what prices to give things.

Last night I re-read the last few chapters of George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss. When I first read it some years ago I felt very uncomfortable about the near-affair between the heroine and Stephen Guest. I felt the same way when I read Gone with the Wind and Anna Karenina a year or so before that. Of course, in the present-day context, I don't see adultery as immoral, but rather as cruel (in most cases). But when I read books set in the nineteenth century I've been highly uncomfortable with it. Perhaps it's because the stakes were so high back then -- an extramarital affair, due to the subsequent rejection by society, was more or less suicide. Also, in the books that I've mentioned there does not seem to be a platonic dimension (as I think there should be) to the love involved; the woman has a rotten, unfulfilled life, and (figuratively) jumps at the first man who comes along who is attractive and attentive and/or friendly, however vacuous and morally weak he may be. And the attraction on both sides mostly seems to derive its strength from its forbiddenness. Anyway, when I read last night, I wasn't so strongly put off any more, and just felt that the story was very sad. Now and then I also think about the fact that the tragic conflict in The Mill on the Floss could not take place today. It seems so absurd that (more or less) artificial social conventions could have had such a crushing impact on people.