There's nothing more romantic or adventurous than buying a toilet, save perhaps trying by every means possible to preserve those already in your keeping. I'm a professional woman, but no plumber, and if you had told me on graduation day that fifteen years later I'd be maintaining and replacing toilets on a semi-annual basis, I would have asked what you were smoking! But that was before I lost my job and had kids and a house and a church to take care of. As a small church pastor's wife and mom of small kids, there are a lot of things you learn out of necessity, but happily in this day and age we have YouTube, where I can learn everything from toilet repair to new surgical techniques, so when you break the porcelain on your forty year old toilet trying to replace leaky washers you can replace the whole thing instead, now if only we had a YouTube channel for character.
Lately I've discovered Maria Edgeworth, a lady who wrote a little before and around the same time as the famed Miss Austen, and I must say I find both authors quite captivating, mostly because I've yearned for a proper Austen successor for years only to find a contemporary, but her stories are as much worth reading as anything in the Austen canon. If there was a YouTube to encourage the growth of character and the cultivation of virtue, it would be the writings of Maria Edgeworth. I haven't read everything, and some of her shorter tales are a little preachy, but overall, and her novels especially, I have really enjoyed as both a story and as a moral lesson and an illumination of various aspects of human character and society. I often decry the lack of morals of modern man, but reading Maria Adgeworth or Jane Austen reminds me that it is the same in any age of the world, even going back to the biblical book of Judges and Ecclesiastes I should remember that, 'every man does what is right in his own eyes,' and that, 'there is nothing new under the sun.'
It isn't that we live in an exceedingly hedonistic age, that is temporal myopia on my part, but rather most men, no matter the age of the world, prefer dissipation and vice and selfishness and their own pleasure above all things, even the welfare and happiness of their own souls and families. While it may be necessary to fix or replace a necessary plumbing feature in one's home, it is not so obviously necessitous to cultivate and grow one's own character and virtues. While the toilet that is flooding the bathroom is an obvious disaster that must be addressed, how little do we realize the shipwreck that is our own morals and go obliviously onward without evening pausing to muse thereupon? That is one reason I love Austen and Edgeworth and some of their contemporary authors: they are a mirror we might hold up and examine our own lives and souls, and hopefully that we may address the faults reflected therein.
Some of the recent movie adaptations of these beloved classics get it right while others miss the point entirely, making Pride and Prejudice into merely a romance or chick flick. How many viewers understand that Elizabeth cast off a 'great catch' because she perceived a glaring personality fault she was sure would doom her to misery in such a marriage? How many of us act like Lydia, running off with Mr. Wickham at great cost to ourselves and those that love us and then return and boast of our triumph at another's expense without the least notion we did anything wrong? What won Darcy Elizabeth's affections? Overthrowing his personal shortcomings and exercising his virtue on her behalf. Which marriage produced a life of mutual comfort, respect, friendship, love, and joy? Only that based upon virtue, that invisible glue that holds families and societies together! How's your plumbing? Is it time to replace a flapper valve or maybe the whole thing? It might be time to take a look!
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