Paul: Emma
The household has been miserable with illness this past week—some kind of vile mashup of cold and norovirus symptoms has felled all three of us and left our daily routine in shambles.
There's been a lot of miserable, huddled TV-watching, is what I mean. Last night Molly suggested "Let's watch Emma, I liked it," and I said "Sounds great," so couchbound and blanketed we settled in.
In the interests of brevity and responsible time management, I'm just going to skip over the usual plot summarizing and rhetorical scene-setting and proceed to the punchline: Composing a story that so aptly depicts personality is a major intellectual achievement.
I think I’m not alone among nebulously “nerdy” men in coming late to the realization of social intelligence as something it was possible to have, and like other intelligences, there are heights of rarefied genius to it.
I have no idea what Jane Austen was like in person, but she clearly had this genius as well as her literary one. Constructing Emma requires rotating a cast of fully-realized social actors in your head. I can appreciate its genius in the way I can appreciate a Chopin etude—that particular feeling of “oh wow” alongside “I cannot imagine what it would be like to have a mind capable of creating this.”