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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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