The wit and wisdom of George Eliot

Despite my best intentions, I've never got around to rereading Middlemarch, and I haven't read anything else by George Eliot in a very long time.  But at last, years after a former roommate raved about it, I'm deep into Daniel Deronda, her brilliant last novel.  Besides a gripping story and vivid characters, she supplies, on virtually every page, deep insights into the human condition, as relevant as ever to our times.

Here's how she begins Chapter 21:

"It is a common sentence that Knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of Ignorance?  Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down.  Knowledge, through patient and frugal centuries, enlarges discovery and makes record of it; Ignorance, wanting its day's dinner, lights a fire with the record, and gives a flavour to its one roast with the burnt souls of many generations.  Knowledge, instructing the sense, refining and multiplying needs, transforms itself into skill and makes life various with a new six days' work; comes Ignorance drunk on the seventh, with a firkin of oil and a match and an easy 'Let there not be'--and the many-coloured creation is shriveled up in blackness.  Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may be; whereas Ignorance is a blind giant who, let him but wax unbound, would make it a sport to seize the pillars that hold up the long-wrought fabric of human good, and turn all the places of joy dark as a buried Babylon."


We must not let those about to run the show in our government this term "wax unbound."

My top 10 + plays for 2013

For me, at least, last year was a great year for theater in New York City--much of it in small venues off and off-off Broadway.


Here are 10 of my favorites--shows I'm hugely grateful for. Many are shows I'll remember for years--and will see again if I have the chance. (See my earlier posts about some of them.) In order from the beginning of the year:

Life and Times: Episodes 1-4 by the Nature Theater of Oklahoma, a Soho Rep production at the Public Theater. I look forward to parts 5-?

The Laramie Project Cycle by the Tectonic Theater Project at Brooklyn Academy of Music:

Part I: The Laramie Project
Part II: The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later

I'm a Stranger Here Myself by Mark Nadler, directed by David Schweizer at the York Theatre

Marcellus Shale by the Talking Band at La Mama

Arguendo by the Elevator Repair Service at the Public Theater

Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play, by Anne Washburn, directed by Michael Friedman at Playwrights Horizon

Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare, set at a women's prison, directed by Philippa Lloyd at BAM; a powerful production from the Donmar Warehouse

Iyom by Lou-Lou Igbokwe, directed by Jessica Creane at the Workshop Theater

Trouble in Mind by Alice Childress, a reading directed by Katrin Hilbe at the Workshop Theater.
In Childress's extraordinary play--daring for its time and still relevant now--a majority black cast with a white director rehearse a Broadway play about lynching. Childress was an African-American actress as well as playwright, and Trouble in Mind, her first professionally produced play, won an Obie in 1956. It never reached Broadway because Childress was unwilling to make the changes, including a new title and an upbeat ending that optioning producers wanted.

Why have I never until now heard of this woman or this play, I wondered, as I watched and listened. I hope to see a full production of it one day soon.

Saint Joan by George Bernard Shaw, staged and performed by Bedlam

Hamlet by William Shakespeare, staged and performed by Bedlam

Disturbing words

From The Immortalization Commission (p. 235) by John Gray:

The end-result of scientific inquiry is to return humankind to its own intractable existence. Instead of enabling humans to improve their lot, science degrades the natural environment in which humans must live. Instead of enabling death to be overcome, it produces ever more powerful technologies of mass destruction. None of this is the fault of science; what it shows is that science is not sorcery. The growth of knowledge enlarges what humans can do. It cannot reprieve them from being what they are.