Into the Wild Spoiler alert...

Sleep is a delicate beast with me. And I think that at this point, even if Ezra were to suddenly start sleeping all night, I would still have trouble. Last night I made the mistake of watching a beautifully resonating film (Into the Wild), while I was still mourning the end of Middlemarch. I spent the night tossing and turning while visions of the Alaskan wilderness, stretches of highway and Christopher's starving face played over and over again in my mind. I was thinking about the last paragraph of Middlemarch this morning while I lay in bed trying my best to sleep in as Matt made blueberry pancakes for the kids. Dorothea spends most of the novel trying to figure out a way to do something hugely important for humanity. She marries her first husband with the firm belief that he will be her accomplice in this endeavor but it is a disastrous marriage. In the end she leads a quiet life with her second husband and does many small good things...George Eliot writes it beautifully...

"Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: 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 numbers who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

Dorothea is idealistic and I would call Christopher (Alexander Supertramp) idealistic too but I feel that that word carries a grain of naivete that is not necessarily part of Christopher. At the poignant end of Into the Wild, the viewer witnesses Christopher's sudden realization that his departure from society etc. to attain peace and happiness was a little misguided, as he (in the film) writes..." happiness is only real when shared."