‘How was it,’ asks George Eliot in Middlemarch, ‘that in the weeks since her marriage, Dorothea had not distinctly observ-ed but felt with a stifling depression, that the large vistas and wide fresh air which she had dreamed of finding in her husband’s mind were replaced by ante-rooms and winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither?’
I cannot reread that passage without thinking of a more modern marriage: the Church of England’s with her latest Archbishop.
Given the tremendous row, we really should read Dr Rowan Williams’s recent speech on Islam and the Law properly, from start to finish. The more I read, the more I am struck by the parallels with Eliot’s Mr Casaubon, his argument ‘lost among small closets and winding stairs’.
Journalists are not good at handling intellectuals. When we come face to face with one of these we treat it like something encountered in a zoo.
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