Here are the final words of Middlemarch, words I have often returned to:

“Her finely-touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the 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 number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

Eliot touches on this earlier in her book as well. Here is a passage from chapter 41:

“Who shall tell what may be the effect of writing? If it happens to have been cut in stone, though it lie face downmost for ages on a forsaken beach, or “rest quietly under the drums and tramplings of many conquests,” it may end by letting us into the secret of usurpations and other scandals gossiped about long empires ago: —this world being apparently a huge whispering-gallery. Such conditions are often minutely represented in our petty lifetime. As the stone which has been kicked by generations of clowns may come by curious little links of effect under the eyes of a scholar, through whose labours it may at last fix the date of invasions and unlock religions, so a bit of ink and paper which has long been an innocent wrapping or stop-gap may at last be laid open under the one pair of eyes which have knowledge enough to turn it into the opening of a catastrophe. To Uriel watching the progress of planetary history from the Sun, the one result would be just as much of a coincidence as the other. Having made this rather lofty comparison I am less uneasy in calling attention to the existence of low people by whose interference, however little we may like it, the course of the world is very much determined.”

Sometimes there are people who are “low people” — mean, cruel, selfish, unkind — whose actions and words add up to horrible things that should be beyond the power of any one person to bring about. The little things, like little seeds, can grow into very big things.

I remain hopeful that even where there are tyrants and would-be tyrants, in the long run it is the steadfastly kind person, the one who knows that “all flourishing is mutual,” the prayerful pastor standing in the streets to be arrested on behalf of the downtrodden, the prayerful grandmother alone in the small dark hours, the person who offers an encouragement to someone who needs it right now, the faithful hobbit—the people who seem unimportant to the writers of history and to the halls of power—who are steadily building a better future for others.

I don’t mean to say everything is working out fine, just be patient. I do mean to say that when I wonder whether that cup of tea and half an hour of my time offered to a crying student really makes a difference, especially when I have reports due and meetings to attend, etc; when I wonder about all of that, words like Eliot’s remind me why I do what I do, and encourage me to keep trying. I won’t save the world, but I can make it better for some of those who come after me.

And so can you.

—George Eliot, Middlemarch