Revelations

One of the last sections of George Eliot's last book, Daniel Deronda is "Revelations" and one of the last chapters begins with this quote from Keats: "My spirit is too weak: mortality/Weights heavily on me like unwilling sleep,/And each imagined pinnacle and steep/Of godlike hardship tell me I must die/Like a sick eagle looking at the sky." You will also recall that The Seventh Seal which comes towards the end of The Book of Revelation, the final book of The New Testament, also hearkens the Second Coming. And from this Bergman drew the title of The Seventh Seal in which Max von Sydow plays chess with Death (Bengt Ekerot ). George Eliot was a more profound thinker than Freud. Buy Middlemarch on Amazon for the twenty bucks it will cost you and you'll save on 20 years of hefty psychoanalytic bills. Deronda, as you may remember, saves the destitute Mirah Cohen, an aspiring opera singer, from death. The scene recalls Virginia Woolf's suicide except that Eliot's character is spared from drowning. Here is Eliot describing Mordecai, a Cabbalist, who is Mirah's long lost brother: "this consumptive Jewish workman in threadbare clothing, lodged by charity, delivering himself to hearers who took his thoughts without attaching any more consequences to them than the Flemings to the ethereal chimes ringing above their market-places--had the chief elements of greatness: a mind consciously, energetically moving with the larger march of human destinies... ."

read the review of Francis Levy's The Kafka Studies Department in Booklife (PW)

and listen to 'Hello Stranger" by Barbara Lewis