“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies

on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity”.

(Middlemarch Chapter XX, http://www.victorianlondon.org/etexts/eliot/middlemarch-0020.shtml).