"When I asked if anyone wanted to hitchhike to the other end of the island and explore St. Trojan, everybody was too timid."

 --Ruth in Tender at the Bone by Ruth Reichl

Ruth, the former editor of Gourmet magazine, is, in this excerpt, a teenage camp counselor who is asking her fellow counselors to go explore the area around the camp with her.

I hitchhiked once.  My husband and I had just finished a one way hike of the John Muir Trail (JMT), a backpacking trip through the Sierra Nevada from the base of Half Dome in Yosemite to the summit of Mt Whitney. We ended the hike at the trailhead parking lot for the Mt. Whitney climb and needed to get down the road 10 miles at 8 pm to the down of Lone Pine, CA, to begin to make our way back to our car in Yosemite.

I got a paper plate and wrote “JMT hikers to Lone Pine, please” and sat down on the curb at the parking lot’s exit for some mild fretting over the situation.


The first people to walk down from the trail were Bill and Robert, friends in their late 50s, grinning and animated by the feeling that the car is in sight, the shoes are coming off the pounded feet and the flip flops are going on. “What’s a JMT hiker?” Bill asked. He didn’t wait for the answer: “Sure, we’ll take you to Lone Pine.”   Bill and Robert were there to climb Mt. Whitney.  “We like to climb 14ers,” said Bill, using the in-the-know lingo for America’s mountains over 14,000 feet.  “Oh, which ones have you climbed?” I asked. “Well, he’s climbed Long’s Peak” Bill said nodding at Robert. “And this one will be my first.” “Yeah,” Robert said. They smiled at themselves.

We arrived in Lone Pine in the dark and turned left on Highway 395, to find every motel lighted with “No Vacancy” signs. “Hmm” Robert said, turning the car around. “That’s OK,” Roger said, “We’re fine. We’ll figure out something.” All the motels south of Whitney Portal Road were also full. “Hmm,” Robert said again.
“It’s no problem,” I said.
“You don’t need to get involved in our situation.”

“But that’s what we do,” Bill said. “We get involved in situations until we solve them.”

“Or until we screw them up,” Robert added.  

“Yeah,” Bill said. They smiled at themselves.

We repeated that we were fine until Robert dropped us off in front of a full motel. We offered him money for gas or beer as they said they were off to have a beer after finishing Day 1. They wouldn’t take it—“we already have 20 beers in our room”—and they waved us good luck as they drove off.

After I took a deep breath before getting in the car, I liked that I was having a tiny bit of an adventure. Just like Ruth, I might have thought, if her book had come to mind, for I admire Ruth for her go-for-it-ness and the interesting things her fearlessness brings her.

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I saw Ruth’s fearlessness in Delia in The Cry of the Kalahari and Deborah in Kabul Beauty School.

Does this entry make you think of a book you enjoy? Or, if you like this passage but it doesn't remind you of any other book, tell me your favorite book instead.

Caroline: replacingmiddlemarch [at] gmail.com

"But I have a belief of my own, and it comforts me."

--Dorothea speaking in Middlemarch by George Eliot


Periodically I re-read my old journals. One artifact that I dig up frequently in their pages in the period from 2005-2008 is sentences describing life philosophies that I’ve written out for myself.

It’s clear from these journal entries that I do not have a life philosophy—a guiding principle that gets you out of bed in the morning and steers you through your day to its satisfying conclusion—but that I love the idea of having one.

During this period, I thought up a life philosophy that appeared to feel very convincing on June 3, 2005, and then a new one, different and equally convincing, on March 8, 2006, and then a third one over a year later.  By 2008, I’d concluded that life philosophies were things that found you, and if you were lucky, you’d become conscious of what it is that is guiding you, as Dorothea is. So I stopped looking for a life philosophy but remained intrigued by people who have them.

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Does this entry make you think of a book you enjoy? Or, if you like this passage but it doesn't remind you of any other book, tell me your favorite book instead.

Caroline: replacingmiddlemarch [at] gmail.com

"The red fire with its gently audible movement seemed like a solemn existence calmly independent of the petty passions, the imbecile desires, the straining after worthless uncertainties..."

--in reference to Mary Garth in Middlemarch by George Eliot.


I aspire to be kind. I want especially to be kind to my parents.  So the other day I thought I’d share some pictures with my mother. I got the camera, the computer and found I was missing the cord to hook them to each other. So I went to my drawer of miscellaneous cords and looked in dismay at the tangle.   How quickly my highest ideals—I want to be kind— become mundane reality—here I am, untangling cords.

So I quit— postponed, I told myself—the project.

How much I want to be able to keep my focus on higher things.  For me, these things are kindness, self acceptance, and modesty, even anonymity, in the face of achievement.   I want to stay focused on these things as the mundane, the small, the petty, intrudes. So I loved the idea that Mary had the fire to escort her mind to, what I want to believe, were the higher things that mattered to her. I loved that she had such a reliable renewable source of comfort and inspiration.

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Caroline: replacingmiddlemarch [at] gmail.com

Lydgate was a happy fellow, “with ideas in his brain that made life interesting.”

 --Lydgate in Middlemarch by George Eliot


A little while ago, I was reading a passage in Crime and Punishment which shows Raskolnikov's mind unraveling in the days after he killed two women. This is my favorite kind of thing to read--about how someone's mind works--and reading is my favorite thing to do.

And yet my brain thought it could captivate me better than Dostoevsky could. Like Lydgate, I too have ideas in my brain that make life interesting. As I was reading, my brain distracted me by choosing that moment to remember that my dad had taken a class called "Daily Themes" in college, a class in which he had to write a short essay every day. I thought it would be fun to try to write daily themes, so my brain spun out several ideas for what my themes for the next few days could be. I closed the book and went to write my first theme. It was about a quote that I'll attribute to the cartoonist Scott Adams though I think I'm only quoting him approximately: 90 percent of ideas fail. When I finished writing my theme, my brain got the idea to try to track what happens to each of my ideas--from questions I think to ask people, to little pieces of writing I do--to see if that 90 percent figure is accurate. So I started taking notes on everything I'd done that day. And I didn't pick Dostoevsky back up until the next.

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Caroline: replacingmiddlemarch [at] gmail.com 

Dorothea “longed for work that would be directly beneficent like the sunshine and the rain."

 --in reference to Dorothea in Middlemarch by George Eliot


Me too. 

So far, I’ve found two activities I can work tirelessly at: Reading fiction and free writing in my journal. Thousands of words go by in evenings that feel short but are in fact long.  But I’ve not yet been able to direct these two efforts—to work my very hardest—at any sort of work that feels beneficent.

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Does this entry make you think of a book you enjoy? Or, if you like this passage but it doesn't remind you of any other book, tell me your favorite book instead.

Caroline: replacingmiddlemarch [at] gmail.com