Everything is simple and fast: 8.1.09

"If we had keen vision and and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity."

-George Eliot

Did you know that George Eliot fell in love with Herbert Spencer, the guy who coined the phrase "survival of the fittest?" And also, did you know that he utterly devastatingly did not return her affections? And that after that he made not so vague allusions to her notably uncomely looks in an essay on personal beauty? So she wrote him into a character in "Middlemarch" and killed him off from a "fattened heart?" You just can't beat that.