Rachel Kelly draws inspiration from George Eliot this week in Kelly’s Keys to Calm.
We parted last week with reference to Rudyard Kipling’s line about meeting ‘Triumph and Disaster’ and treating those two impostors just the same: as we enter exam season, parents may find it helpful for their children who are now the most examined and tested in history. I find that talking to our five – three of them teenagers – about the stress to supposedly ‘succeed’ has helped my own sanity. When I say to them, ‘I love you for what you are, not what you can do’, the words are as relevant to me and my anxious striving friends as to them. We are not valued for the sum of our supposed achievements but for our importance as mothers, friends, wives, and daughters. When did you hear a funeral address about someone’s ascent of the greasy pole? Sorry to keep cheating by turning to those who write far better than me, but here’s George Eliot at the conclusion of Middlemarch. ‘For 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 have lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.’
Rachel Kelly is the author of ‘Black Rainbow’ her memoir of how poetry helped overcome depression, published by Hodder & Stoughton. Don’t forget she will be at the Idler Academy talking about her book on 5th June. Tickets are £20idler.co.uk and rachelkelly.co.uk
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