The seeds of joy can be forever wasted

I have to send Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages by Phyllis Rose to a friend in the book club so she has time to read it before next month's meeting. I'm always nervous about recommending a book I love to them -- what if they hate it, and their resulting criticism destroys it for me forever? I remember reading Joan Fontaine's bio when I was a teen -- she told Laurence Olivier that she had just married Brian Aherne, and he said sneeringly, "Is that the best you can do?" and she had to admit that from that moment on, she thought less of her marital choice. Withering criticism can stick in our minds for a long time.

Anyway, I have to blog about a section in the book where Rose talks about how partners can disagree over the most trivial matters and thereby destroy their happiness.

"Over what pitiful pieces of ground these unheroic matrimonial battles were fought! One might be embarrassed to write of such trivialities were it not for the example and encouragement of George Eliot, who believed it was precisely 'in the acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are forever wasted, until men and women look round with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste had made, and say, the earth bears no more harvest of sweetness."

My own parents argued over this figurine (above) from Germany during their divorce. It became a symbol for everything that went wrong, and the struggle over who was going to get her became titanic.

Now I look at her, and I think, what was that all about? Here she is on my mantel in England, her power all gone. She has come to represent to me the futility of fighting over things in life that don't matter.