Elder Richard L. Evans, Part Two: George Eliot and the Wasted Opportunity

 For Part One, Part Three, Part Four, or Part Five of this talk, follow the appropriate link. 

On to the next part of Elder Richard L. Evans' talk, "Where Are You Really Going?" Elder Evans emphasizes that this life is critical to determining where we go in the next - that what we do here shapes us for what comes after.

And then comes our next reference:

The Quote 

"And I would plead with you, 

wherever you are, 

to prepare yourselves for opportunities that await you here and now, 

as well as for a future that is forever. 

“What is opportunity,” asked George Eliot, “to the man who can’t use it?” '

 

George Eliot

The above reference comes from the author George Eliot, which as some of you know, was only a pen name for Mary Ann Evans, a writer who wrote when women writers were frowned upon, and so overcame this difficulty by writing under a man's name.

She is known largely for novels like Middlemarch, Adam Bede, and Silas Marner, but the above quote comes from another book entitled Scenes from Clerical Life. It was the first book published under her famous pseudonym.

It consisted of several short stories, and the one the quote comes from is "The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton." 

The actual quote in context comes from the narrator of the story, describing the Reverend Amos Brown in a terrible predicament that's only getting worse. A woman from the village has moved in with him and his wife, and the entire village assumes the woman is the Reverend's mistress.

 

Then the narrator proceeds to say, 

And now, here is an opportunity for an accomplished writer 

to apostrophize calumny, to quote Virgil, 

and to show that he is acquainted with the most ingenious things 

which have been said on that subject in polite literature.

But what is opportunity to the man who can’t use it? 

An undefecundated egg, 

which the waves of time wash away into nonentity. 

So, as my memory is ill-furnished, and my notebook still worse, 

I am unable to show myself either erudite or eloquent 

apropos of the calumny whereof the Rev. Amos Barton was the victim. 

 I can only ask my reader,—

did you ever upset your ink-bottle, 

and watch, in helpless agony, 

the rapid spread of Stygian blackness over your fair manuscript or fairer table-cover? 

With a like inky swiftness 

did gossip now blacken the reputation of the Rev. Amos Barton, 

causing the unfriendly to scorn 

and even the friendly to stand aloof, 

at a time when difficulties of another kind were fast thickening around him. 

 

Man, but there are some big words in there!

To summarize as far as I can see it, the narrator refuses to be disgusted with the reverend's situation and behavior, and simply compares what is happening to the poor reverend to an accidental ink-spill that ruins all the nice things it touches.

The writer says he's not expert enough, nor does he have the moral high ground enough to be disgusted at what's happened to the reverend, because similar things have happened to him as well, and to a lot of other people. Or rather, her, as well.

Opportunity then becomes an egg - something of potential and newly born - that's let go and goes off into nothing. 

While George Eliot chose to deliberately let that opportunity go for reasons of intellectual and moral honesty, what becomes of us if we have good opportunities and we let them go for less vaunted reasons? We've been put here on this earth by God, and Jesus Christ came to provide salvation for us, and do we just let that go? Out of lack of interest, or fear, or distrust, or tiredness? Or whatever reason.

That's a question each of us will one day have to confront.