Silas Marner by George Eliot aka Mary Ann Evans - 10 out of 10

 Silas Marner by George Eliot aka Mary Ann Evans

10 out of 10

 

 

Among the important themes of this important novel, this reader has been struck by the idea that being materially affluent does not bring happiness – a concept that was written Avant la lettre, only more recent studies have dealt with the Hedonic Adaptation phenomenon, the discovery that we adapt to material things, cars, jewels and much else, and the research made with winners of big lottery prizes, of over one million dollars, has demonstrated that the lucky ones do experience a boost in their levels of life satisfaction, but it only lasts for a few months, after which thy return to their base level of happiness…

 

The under signed has met with Silas Marner before http://realini.blogspot.com/2016/09/note-on-silas-marner-by-george-eliot.html albeit it has been in an adapted form, listening to a BBC version of the story of a weaver that has to suffer and find a way to cope with adversity and trauma, not just once, because he has to face two dramas in his life, proving yet another point, the moral of the story of the Zen Master, hears by yours truly in the exquisite Charlie Wilson’s War http://realini.blogspot.com/2017/06/charlie-wilsons-war-written-by-aaron.html as told by the regretted Philip Seymour Hoffman.

A Zen Master has a horse that runs away, provoking the compassion of the villagers who are told by the master that ‘we shall see’ and the runaway horse returns with a group of wild horses, an event that makes the same people express their joy, only to face the same wise ‘we shall see’, which is what the serene figure says when his son falls off one of the wild animals, when he was trying to tame him, but the men of the village are wrong to feel sorry, because due to that accident, the son is exempted when the army recruits come to take young ones into service and this goes on…the point in the movie was that the Americans have trained and armed the mujahidin, in order to be able to fight the soviet invaders in their tanks and helicopters, fighter jets, only to see them turn against the USA and help Bin Laden rise to become the loathsome figure, killed in a raid by Navy Seals, albeit the very stable genius and his cohorts of idiots doubt that and promote yet another embarrassing, deplorable conspiracy which maintains that there has been no raid, just a fake orchestration and the previous leaders had just wanted to take false credit.

 

In other words, there is no limit to what these twenty first century creatures promote and believe, starting with the cretin they have elected for the top job, which we can only hope he would have to leave – though he relies on extremist militias to ‘lock up’ his opponents, just like any vicious tyrant of a third world country – or ‘shit hole’ as he used to call them – and eventually keep him in office in spite of losing an election that he keeps stating he can only lose if it is rigged and the new age Caligula has been trumpeting this false theory for more than a year, playing the game of the enemies…Putin and his military machine love it when the supreme commander of their most powerful for keeps peddling and propagating the misinformation that they create in their laboratories, to disseminate mistrust of democracy, division, weakness and hopefully a civil fight between bitter internal enemies that really belong to two different, adversarial countries…perhaps they will have a smaller civil war to rearrange states that believe in the devil incarnate and others that still hang on to democratic, civilized values…

 

Silas Marner stands in such a contrast with figures of this present and of other ages, men – especially - with power and money and yet without a moral compass, selfish and narcissistic – just like the one who represents so many tens of millions and we can add other such lunatics and beats of prey, leaders of Brazil, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Belarus, Russia, China, North Korea and the list is longer –who are not and have not been more satisfied with their lives once they have gotten access to riches, supercars, yachts – a documentary looked at the febrile competition between such owners of long vessels and how they envy each other if one has a small submarine or another some other gadget that makes the others green with jealousy…in other words, the sky is the limit and even when in possession of big boats, palaces and billions, many would still wish for more…H. L. Mencken — 'A wealthy man is one who earns $100 a year more than his wife's sister's husband.'

Men and women have been presented with two scenarios, one in which they work in a team where all have let us say about seventy thousand dollars per year and the tested one has ten thousand dollars more and in the second scenario, all the team has – I do not remember the exact figures, but the idea is correct, humans would be satisfied with earning much less in an environment where they have more than the rest, rather than have more money, but in a setting where the others have even more – let us say 130k, while the tested one has just 120k…it is all a question of comparing with the others…

 

Silas Marner is first living among a small Calvinist society – obsessed as I am with the horrors of what has been happening over the past four years in America, where I had longed to live in the nineties and perhaps it is all for the better that I am not there, though my sister lives in Chicago, I would say that maybe they were the ancestors of the evangelicals that form the troops of the cult of  Orange Beelzebub – and when an important sum of money is missing, the hero is first suspected of having taken it and then, given the circumstances, the bag found at his house, the knife near the body of the late deacon and the lapses that the main character suffers from – was it epilepsy or some other form of ailment – they accuse him of stealing, then they pass judgment on him, though he maintains he is innocent.

It is a frame up, but thinking of the aforementioned Zen Master Story, ‘we shall see’ must have worked wonders here, for if it were not for this first trauma and then the second, Silas Marner might have not had the chance to transform, resurrect himself and experience what is called in psychology PTG aka Post Traumatic Growth, as opposed to the better known PTSD, which most people that have been traumatized suffer from, but there is also the chance for the stronger to resist and come out from their struggle with even more power and gumption.

 

Indeed, Silas Marner is again set against the evil, for the money he works hard for is stolen from him, in the village he has moved to, after the Calvinist community had sentenced him, and he feels doomed, until  he is surprised to find the gold…returned to him, in the form of the locks in the hair of a child…this would prove that we are better off being time affluent than materially rich and research has also demonstrated that the happiest people have in fact not money in common, but strong ties with families and friends…therefore the result is that we have a happy Silas Marner when he is…robbed.