I recently started reading “Silas Marner” by George Eliot.

Despite how I like to think of myself as someone who is well-read, who has patience for long books with long sentences, whose favorite author is George Eliot – in reality that’s not who I’ve been for years.

The Internet Age has taken hold of me. Being a busy, grateful, tired mother to sweet and thoroughly demanding little people has taken hold of me. I’m constantly holding my phone as it yet holds me.

Enough with the passivity. I wasn’t a victim. None of this happened without me tacitly agreeing to it.

Regardless, here I am now, as a once avid reader who now only consumes YouTube clips and heated Facebook arguments. Still longing for something real. Finding scraps of it occasionally which only makes me hungrier. And so I keep on scrolling.

A Harder Drug Than Wordle

Did I tell you about my other pastime? It’s called Sedecordle. 

First I did Wordle along with everyone else. Then I found myself wanting something more challenging so I moved onto Quordle – Wordle but with four words at once. Then eight with Octordle. And now Sedecordle, which has sixteen.

(I did try out Kilordle which has a whopping thousand words at once but the way it works, it’s really not the same game).

About this Sedecordle. You have to get sixteen words in twenty-one guesses. And it’s way too easy for me by now. I’m not trying to brag, that’s just how it is. If you spent as much time on it as I did, you’d be just as good.

I try to set goals for myself: can I get all the words in nineteen guesses? Eighteen? My best is seventeen; I’ve done that a few times. Sixteen still eludes me and for that I should probably be grateful. There’s still one more hill to climb.

But Honestly…

It brings me little joy, this game. It’s become too methodical, mechanical. And when you win, there’s no joyful celebration screen. Only the option to start again. 

You’re probably wondering why I do it. I wish I could tell you.

Perhaps it’s the combination of having something for my fingers to do, for my brain to do. A distraction from everything else, but I’m still doing, still thinking. Even if it’s all for nothing, and it’s only words.

But why do I need to distract myself? Isn’t life good and rich as it is? Why do I turn away from it?

Really, at this point I believe it’s just a bad habit. My attention span has been whittled down so much from my circumstances, technology, and my lack of resistance to all that brings, and I just got used to this way of living – half in the world, half given away to a screen.

But there was still some life left in me. A small flickering flame that whispered, “Es passt nicht” which loosely translates as, “Girl, you’re better than this!”

So this weekend I got myself to a Barnes and Noble.

The Stirrings of Teshuva

It wasn’t an instant remedy. The book stayed tucked in my backpack while I continued to watch political commentary and Key and Peele shorts for another day or two. Finally, (I think as a justification to avoid folding some laundry), I took it out, poured some coffee, and humbly tried to obtain readmittance to the world of literature, sensibility, and culture.

Oh reader, dear reader. 

The strangest thing happened. 

For although “Silas Marner” was first published in 1861, I felt it speaking to my situation directly. 

George Eliot. Wow. They don’t call her the greatest novelist of all time for nothing. (Plus, apparently she was a Human Design Reflector, v’hamayvin yavin). 

I’m only three chapters in, so this is most definitely not a book review, just my thoughts so far. Warning: I’m going to quote long paragraphs that you’re under no obligation to read, but you absolutely should because they’re fantastic.

My Non-Book Review

The book starts by introducing the character of Silas Marner, a man who took up residence in the village of Ravelo after being wrongly accused of theft and banished from his religious community. 

The village people are suspicious of Marner, so he becomes a lonely recluse, making a living through his vocation as linen-weaver. As the years go by, having lost his connection to his past and being shunned by the people around him, Marner develops an obsession with the money earned through his work. Toiling long hours and spending very little, he hoards his gold coins and takes them out each night to hold and count them. 

But what were the guineas to him who saw no vista beyond countless days of weaving? It was needless for him to ask that, for it was pleasant to him to feel them in his palm, and look at their bright faces, which were all his own: it was another element of life, like the weaving and the satisfaction of hunger, subsisting quite aloof from the life of belief and love from which he had been cut off.

It hadn’t always been this way: before his exile, Marner had been a valued member of his community. He worked hard at his craft, and the money he made funded his simple, happy life.

The weaver’s hand had known the touch of hard-won money even before the palm had grown to its full breadth; for twenty years, mysterious money had stood to him as the symbol of earthly good, and the immediate object of toil. He had seemed to love it little in the years when every penny had its purpose for him; for he loved the purpose then. But now, when all purpose was gone, that habit of looking towards the money and grasping it with a sense of fulfilled effort made a loam that was deep enough for the seeds of desire and as Silas walked homeward across the fields in the twilight, he drew the money and thought it was brighter in the gathering gloom.

When a person becomes disconnected from a life of true purpose, counterfeit pseudo-purposes and fixations start to creep in.

So, year after year, Silas Marner had lived in this solitude, his guineas rising in the iron pot, and his life narrowing and hardening itself more and more into a mere pulsation of desire and satisfaction that had no relation to any other being. His life had reduced itself to the functions of weaving and hoarding, without any contemplation of an end towards which the functions tended. The same sort of process has perhaps been undergone by wiser men, when they have been cut off from faith and love – only, instead of a loom and a heap of guines, they have some erudite research, some ingenious project, or some well-knit theory.

Oh and don’t I know about it! No gold coins or well-knit theories for me, though. It’s just my repeated scrolling and watching and playing of empty word games…

No, I’m not cut off from faith and love, thank God!

But how much am I fully engaged with the faith and love that blessedly colors my world?

And I’m not saying I feel my life has no purpose. Far from it – intellectually, I certainly think my life, and your life – and all life has purpose, and I can show you the sources to prove it! As an idea, I ponder it and believe in it.

But how much do I feel it? How much do I live it, and breathe it?

Not so much, these days.

Theoretically, I want to do it more.

I’d like to add that to my image of myself: to be someone who is not only well-read and cultured and accomplished and all that – but also someone who’s here. Who’s awake, alive to the ever-present possibility of being attached to something infinitely greater than herself.

But…

But, but, but…

Between all the cooking, and cleaning, and laundry, and carpools…

…and being emotionally present, and settling arguments, and getting knots out of four tangled heads of hair…

Sometimes I just want to sleep. Or scroll. And sink into the couch.

אֲנִ֥י יְשֵׁנָ֖ה וְלִבִּ֣י עֵ֑ר

I am asleep but my heart is awake. 

(Shir Hashirim 5:2)

And there you have it, my point of challenge. I can see where I want to be – no, where I want to want to be – but I’m not there yet. 

The Beginning of Aspiration

Aviva Zornberg explores the idea of aspiration in relation to the Torah commandment to be holy. 

Amidst a long list of calls for restraint concerning purity and forbidden relations, kedushah – holiness – is the new direction we are to adopt after turning away from temptation. It’s “a movement upward, an energetic state”. 

Kedushah can be understood as the aspiration toward such vitality. A kind of discomfort is its baseline: a restlessness about all given situations. Here, one is not yet who one wishes to be. One seeks out a deeper and larger way to be. 

Aviva Zornberg, “The Hidden Order of Intimacy”, p164).

Being truly awake, not wasting my time, being free from addictions, and living a life of purpose – like the perfect score in Sedecordle, it all still eludes me.

And I should probably be grateful, because isn’t that what it’s all about?

The joy is in the journey, the movement upwards, the not being there yet.

There’s still one more hill to climb.