I guess I really should write something, if only in order to authenticate this site's claims to plurality. However, in lieu of actually writing something myself, I'm about to do something shockingly lame: quote from a novel. That's right, Symposiasts is spiralling down towards that flock of overly earnest blogs seeking to memorialise that inevitably fleeting bond between the mind and the written word (!). What I'm trying to say is that meaning does not easily survive the move into online personal publishing. But I will try. As a highly analytical person (who at heart is and will always be a romantic) I've often pondered (as part of my regular program of analysis) whether I will ever be able to truly "live" in the moment; enjoy something without guilt, or thought of consequence; experience pleasure not tinged with an awareness of its fleetingness etc. etc. As I perused the "best bits" of George Eliot's Middlemarch recently, I came across a passage that I think perfectly encapsulates the pitfalls of my kind of character and disposition... and here it is:


"It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never be liberated from a small hungry shivering self – never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardour of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted."