Key to All Middleworlds

meika loofs samorzewski 11 Apr 2026

There are many middle worlds in the realm of literature and mythology, and indeed in the dominion of empires and realms with which these originary places are orbitally locked.

Zhongguo/Middle kingdom, Mesopotamia, meditullium, Madhyadesha, Midgard, Middle earth. There are so many they have no middle ground, but constitute all mythology between the earth and the heavens, somehow...

Quite often they are treated as landfills for our best ideas, best hopes, greatest failures, no doubt this is why they can feel like middens that make the inner archaeologist smile. We throw our waste close by to where we dream.

They are middle worlds because we center our living, in and around our shared lives by our common and near-to-hand knowns and familiars. The safer and more routine it becomes then the harder it is to imagine anything lies beyond what we know. A sense of caution then safely ensures we look no further, certainly this is the sense we get of the hobbits' Shire, that even more middle bit of Middle-earth.

Of course this ties in with an imperious sense of what is important to Empire.

A recent post of mine caught a dialogue, between Mr. Casubon and Dorothea, which captures the entirety of the novel Middlemarch, which is a illustration that we can make life decisions about our relationships based on imperfect assumptions, or hopes projected, that perhaps, with an earlier inquiry, or less constrained conversation, the fateful decision, or hope, or fear, might not have passed into a story which is worthy of a novel-length treatment. At this early-ish point in the novel, this conversation feels like it is part of a short story, however the work is not called The Key to All Mythology, after Mr. Casubon’s life project, but Middlemarch, and as a 19^th Century serialised newspaper novel in which the variations and contexts of those imperfect understandings of the orbitally-locked relationships of others is explored in wider detail and implication. The genius of the title is that this middle of Middlemarch, say, compared to a dream of Hardy’s Wessex, is also an edge. March as in borderland where threats and opportunities arise, and where empires rarely know where they start exactly, nor where they end, and constant war is the empires only true companion, standing there with middle-finger extended.

I also said there, that empathy is what worlds these stories. This is now a commonplace link [empathy/literature] as a practical outcome, but it bears repeating.

Empathy, is not just some inane practising of gossip as data, empathy’s work is why we tell them, and why we listen. Stories middle our world. They tell the world. They are the medium of our (dis)contents. The worlding’s urge is messaged by the medium of empathy. This means that this feeling of middle-ness as rightness is an outcome of the prosocial work which constitutes all mythology, all literature, all art. Work, effort, labours in which the world is con-founded by selfing the world among others doing the same (the march) which thus is no ‘key’, but that set of efforts and labours, which, so often made under mistaken assumptions or ‘identities’… —then still projects, and regardlessly creates the world, with or without the truth of the matter. The story born is the mistake as much as the challenge borne.

In empathy’s oversight, the world goes on, yes, regardless of your mistakes, which in any case then labour the world in both error and its correction. The world never needs saving like the stories tell, that’s just to make you feel special when you’re run down in the safe boredom of success. Despite mythology and its cosmological world-saving potentials, or keys, empathy’s work is all very humdrum and domestic, the stories are told by the hearth, and stored in a cupboard. Life goes on, and we dance like Janus shifting from foot to foot, even if we are really Sisyphus who takes on Atlas’ job when he goes on holiday and never comes back.

"I didn't understand what he meant just 'now' ."

Narcissists of course seek to either sit on that rock, or be that world. The rest of us often mistake the errors of mistaken identity as somehow affecting the end of the world, which they do not.

This follows on from From Chapter X of Middlemarch by George Eliot (substack.com) and is crossposted at substack.com