#prince hammy was so right when he gave that speech

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ENGL 306 Blog 4

Melodramatic Melancholy

The opening of George Eliot’s “The Lifted Veil” is honestly just great to me. “The time of my end approaches.” is quite a way to open a story, but I think the immediate desire Latimer feels for his own demise is what seals the idea for me. He spends so much time expressing his desire to die, “Unless, then, I am cursed with an exceptional physical constitution, as I am cursed with an exceptional mental character, I shall not much longer groan under the wearisome burthen of this earthly existence”.

In a way, I know the talk. My depressing friends and I had always said we don’t want to live too long lives, the desire for death and the disdain of life being strong in a group of edgy, mentally ill teenagers. 

That Latimer knows his death for certain, down to the exact date, for he foresaw it in a vision is what makes the whole thing all the more interesting. “I shall be sitting in this chair, in this study, at ten o’clock at night, longing to die, weary of incessant insight and foresight, without delusions and without hope.” These visions he seems to have are a burden I suppose.

How he describes his coming death is an tangle of humor, depression, and I think a nice detail to human nature. When his death comes, he will ring a bell for his staff, despite knowing it won’t save him. The humor comes in with how it won’t save him. 

“My two servants are lovers, and will have quarrelled. My housekeeper will have rushed out of the house in a fury, two hours before, hoping that Perry will believe she has gone to drown herself. Perry is alarmed at last, and is gone out after her. The little scullery-maid is asleep on a bench: she never answers the bell; it does not wake her.”

That kind of interpersonal drama is hilarious to me. A man is dying and he won’t be saved because of a lover’s quarrel and a deep sleeper. I laughed at that, and it’s the kind of gallows humor that really expresses Latimer’s conscious acceptance of this fate. 

The detail I loved though is that despite his desire to die, as shown in the first two paragraphs, he really doesn’t.

“I make a great effort, and snatch at the bell again. I long for life, and there is no help. I thirsted for the unknown: the thirst is gone. O God, let me stay with the known, and be weary of it: I am content.”

He wants to die, and also knows that when the time comes he will grasp at life because no living soul wants to die, no matter how much it protests persisting.