"It is never too late to be who you might have been."

[steepholm]

I've recently seen this rather facile apercu attributed to George Eliot, but without a specific source. Is it genuine? It seems a most un-Eliotic thought to me. Having Middlemarch fairly fresh in my mind, it strikes me that it's a book all about the realization that it's too late to be what one might have been. Look at Lydgate! Look at Casaubon! Look at Lydgate again!

I've not read all of Eliot by any means, and maybe she has her lapses into airheaded optimism, but I find it hard to imagine. I might have bought the quotation had it been attributed to Dickens, but even Scrooge can never be what he might have been - the contented husband of Belle. He can only be what he can still become, someone who "knows how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possesses the knowledge." Which may be better or may be worse, but certainly isn't the same.

Comments

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

an alternate possibility is that I'm understanding what one is rather differently from the way you're reading it.

I don't understand this. Can you explain?

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

You'll probably think it's facile too, but I just mean that I'm seeing "what one is" as having little to do with what one accomplishes or one's role or identity as such, and instead as one's emotional centre.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Okay, I think I see what you're getting at. Possibly you could read the quotation in that way, but it doesn't seem to me a very natural interpretation. "Might have been" is surely a phrase that directs one's attention to circumstances, and the differences between past and present possibilities. "It's never too late to be what you are capable of being", or "It's never too late to be who you are", seem closer to what I think you're saying here, but I may well be misreading you.