"If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence"

Human experience often focuses on the extraordinary, moments of triumph, tragedy, and drama, while daily life, with its quiet repetitions, tends to slip past unnoticed. George Eliot turns this tendency on its head by suggesting that utter attentiveness to the ordinary would be overwhelming, not dull. If our senses were so finely tuned that nothing escaped us, the cumulative details of existence would form a cacophony. The idea of "hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heart beat" transforms the mundane into something astonishingly present, overwhelming the mind and the senses. Much like how absolute silence can be deafening, absolute awareness would drown the individual in the sheer volume of existence.

Eliot draws a line between what humans can comfortably perceive and what remains hidden behind the “other side of silence.” Life is filled with countless details, brief exchanges, small movements, unnoticed acts, all constituting the web of human experience. To have a “keen vision” of every common detail would be less about enlightenment than about emotional inundation. It would strip away the filters that protect sanity, revealing immense intricacies that the mind, perhaps mercifully, cannot bear. The ordinary registers as silence simply because minds are attuned to highlight what is novel or threatening; the rest becomes a background hum, almost imperceptible.

What Eliot uncovers is how ignorance or selective perception acts as a kind of mercy. The inability to perceive everything is a safeguard, keeping individuals from being lost in the endless details of life. By describing this hidden world as a “roar,” she emphasizes the power and violence dormant in the commonplace. The quote is ultimately a meditation on limits, of perception, of empathy, of knowledge, and on the necessity of these limitations to survive and make meaning. Far from mere indifference, silence shelters people from the chaos that lies beneath the surface of every moment.