“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”

Eliot's narrator says this about the small disappointments that everybody absorbs without noticing, and it is the argument for taking another person's ordinary life seriously. It is also a fair description of what intimacy asks of us: attention loud enough to hear a heart beat.