— Middlemarch (1872), Chapter 7
About this quote
हिन्दी में
संकीर्ण वही मन है जो किसी विषय को कई दृष्टिकोणों से देख न सके।
What it means
The sentence defines a vice as an inability and then stops. It says what a narrow mind cannot do; it says nothing about what the broad mind is supposed to do with the several views once it has them. That silence is doing work, because seeing every side is entirely compatible with never landing on one, and the sentence issues no bill for the landing.
It is also built as an accusation rather than a practice. A subject is any subject, so the remark is portable, available on demand, and almost always produced about somebody else. A maxim in this shape flatters whoever quotes it, which is a good reason to be suspicious when it arrives in your own mouth.
What it teaches you
Watch which direction a maxim points when you reach for it. If you can state the opposing case fluently but cannot say which side you are on and why, you have demonstrated the capacity the sentence praises and skipped the part that costs something. The concrete discipline: after listing the viewpoints, write the next sentence, the one beginning and so I think, with a reason attached, and notice how much harder that sentence is than the survey that preceded it.
अर्थ और सीख
यह वाक्य संकीर्णता को एक अक्षमता से परिभाषित करता है, और यह बताता ही नहीं कि कई दृष्टिकोण देख लेने के बाद किया क्या जाए। इसी ख़ाली जगह की वजह से यह ऐसा सूत्र बन जाता है जो बोलने वाले को शाबाशी देता है और आम तौर पर किसी दूसरे पर कसा जाता है। सीख यह है कि दूसरे पक्ष की बात दोहरा देना आधा काम है; असली काम उसके बाद वह वाक्य लिखने में है कि आप किस ओर हैं और क्यों।
Where it comes from
The narrator, on Mr Brooke’s cheerfully inconsistent politics. It is a mild sentence with a sharp edge — Eliot is not praising open-mindedness, she is describing a man who uses it to avoid ever holding a position.
Lifted out of the paragraph it becomes a straightforward plea for perspective, which is a friendlier line than the one Eliot actually wrote.
