“. . . [F]or the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
This provocative ending to George Eliot’s Middlemarch has an unlikely application, one which became apparent when I first entered into a conversation that began with the statement, “I don’t vote.” While Eliot is reflecting on the heroine of the story and not on voting, this idea of “unhistoric acts” and “unvisited tombs” speaks peculiarly to such a conversation.
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