— Middlemarch (1872), Chapter 72
About this quote
हिन्दी में
हम जीते किस लिए हैं, अगर एक-दूसरे का जीवन थोड़ा कम कठिन बनाने के लिए नहीं?
What it means
The sentence is a question, and the bar it sets is deliberately low: not to make life happy for each other, not to rescue anyone, only to make it less difficult. It is also reciprocal — to each other, not from the capable down to the needy — so nobody in the exchange is cast as the benefactor.
It is usually read as a call to grand service, which is nearly the opposite of what the words do. The line issues no command at all; it asks what else the living is for, and leaves the reader holding the question along with the burden of supplying a better answer.
What it teaches you
Measure by subtraction rather than addition: the call returned, the form filled in for someone who cannot read it, the errand taken off a tired person’s list. None of that registers as achievement, and the line locates the real accounting exactly there — so waiting for a difficulty large enough to be worth your effort is how the ones in front of you get skipped.
अर्थ और सीख
यह पंक्ति सवाल की शक्ल में है, और इसका पैमाना जान-बूझकर छोटा रखा गया है — दूसरों का जीवन सुखी बनाना नहीं, बस थोड़ा कम कठिन बनाना। इसमें एक-दूसरे शब्द अहम है: यह ऊपर से नीचे की ओर दान नहीं, आपसी लेन-देन है। सीख यह है कि किसी का बोझ घटाना ही सेवा का असली माप है, और ऐसे मौके रोज़ सामने होते हैं — किसी बड़े अवसर का इंतज़ार करना ही चूक है।
Where it comes from
Dorothea Brooke, late in the novel, after a long education in the gap between her large ambitions and the small good actually available to her.
Eliot ends the book by arguing that unhistoric acts and unvisited tombs account for most of the world’s improvement. This sentence is that argument in one line, spoken by the character who had to give up an epic to reach it.
