We finished our discussion on September 23rd of George Eliot's story "The Lifted Veil" with Latimer's invocation at the end of his life of "the one Unknown Presence, revealed and yet hidden by the moving curtain of the earth and sky" (page 190 of the Great Conversations 6 anthology).
In going back over the story, I found numerous instances of the word "unknown," highlighted below in boldface. On page 178, Eliot writes of Latimer's wife Bertha, who had been betrothed to Latimer's brother Alfred before his death: "Bertha the slim, fair-haired girl, whose present thoughts and emotions were an enigma to me amidst the fatiguing obviousness of the other minds around me, was as absorbing to me as a single unknown today--as a single hypothetic proposition to remain problematic till sunset; and all the cramped, hemmed-in belief, trust, and distrust, of my nature, welled out in this one narrow channel."
On page 181 Latimer says "Before marriage she had completely mastered my imagination, for she was a secret to me; and I created the unknown thought before which I trembled as if it were hers."
On the next page, the clairvoyant Latimer, in the midst of a miserable marriage, says that Bertha wished he would commit suicide, "but suicide was not in my nature." He continues, "I was too completely swayed by the sense that I was in the grasp of unknown forces, to believe in my power of self-release."
By page 184, Latimer has withdrawn almost completely from society, and "the more frequent and vivid became such visions as that I had had of Prague -- of strange cities, of sandy plains, of gigantic ruins, of midnight skies with strange bright constellations, of mountain passes, of grassy nooks flecked with the afternoon sunshine through the boughs; I was in the midst of such scenes, and in all of them one presence seemed to weigh on me in all these mighty shapes -- the presence of something unknown and pitiless."
We may rightly ask how this "unknown presence" drives the plot of the story and Latimer the character. I would answer that it represents the one thing Latimer with all his powers of reading people's minds and seeing into the future cannot grasp or comprehend. It's unknowable and ineffable, and it is embodied for Latimer in the enigmatic woman Bertha, who, as revealed by Mrs. Archer, had intended to kill him.
