"It exists, it matters, but who can trace it?"

15 March 2021: "In its lovely final passage, Eliot writes of Dorothea that the effect of her goodness was 'incalculably diffusive': It exists, it matters, but who can trace it? Applied to books, that becomes a moral argument for fiction I think I can defend. Whatever Middlemarch has been doing to the world all these many years, I like to think it is diffuse, and diffusing, and incalculably good." --Kathryn Schulz, "What Is It About Middlemarch?"

Been thinking about Schulz's piece on and off all day. She says so eloquently what I have been trying to explain to my students about this novel. 

It also touches on an eternal but also extra-pandemic-y question: what difference can any one person make? Especially ordinary people? If you do good, the book suggests, it matters.