Unless you’re an English or Comp Lit major, you’ve almost certainly never encountered George Eliot’s Middlemarch, a classic 19th-century novel that, some would argue, represents the apogee of Victorian-era literature.

In my experience, the English professors here have expressed a devotion to Middlemarch so ardent it borders on occult. Almost all of my professors have, at one point or another during the semester, abandoned their lecture notes and extemporaneously composed paeans to the novel. Frankly, it wouldn’t surprise me if the English faculty met fortnightly in a subterraneous lair beneath Goldwin Smith to don Victorian era habiliments, recite passages from the book and bow down before an effigy of George Eliot.

To most, though, Middlemarch is just a pretentious announcement of its readers’ erudition, a tome that adorns the bookshelves of people who care for this sort of recognition. Due to its length (nearly 1000 pages) and diction (polysyllabic words abound), Middlemarch is, indeed, undeniably highbrow and not exactly a beach read.

To a large extent, the book is about how even the people most determined to pursue a life contrary to popular convention are often unable to withstand the conforming powers of society. Several characters, ambitious and iconoclastic in the beginning of the novel, end up fully assimilating into the town of Middlemarch’s society. They join the “multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats.” They add to the “good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little.”

This, I would say, is the timeless theme of Eliot’s novel. Though the book may appear stuffy to many modern readers, this lesson never flags in relevance.

Less than a week ago, my friend and I went to the career fair in Barton Hall. On the way, we noted our similar career trajectories. We’re both studying literature; we’d both like to do journalism, preferably in the arts; and we’re both deferring the possibility of graduate school.

Naturally, we were heading to the Peace Corps table.

Though I had been feeling comfortable in the company of someone with a similar laissez faire approach to the job search, once inside, among a throng of suit-clad pre-professionals, I began to feel a suffocating anxiety. There was a current buzzing through the room generated, I would posit, by all the networking energy emanating from the employer tables. (I don’t believe in feng shui or any of that new age crap, but I swear, if I had gotten a step closer to the J.P. Morgan table, I think I would have bolted to the men’s room, changed into a coat and tie and begun rattling off my credentials to anyone who would have listened.)

Now, I should make it clear that I have nothing against ambition or pre-professionals. I think the desire to be successful is, on the surface, a very virtuous thing. And I recognize that there’s something insular about patronizing the students who most often possess this ambition just because they don’t read Joyce or Kant or Cummings. In fact, many of my smartest, most introspective friends are on pre-law, pre-med and pre-business tracks, so I’m aware that any attempt at such a categorical classification would be unfair and specious.

No, my problem with the way pre-professionals approach their careers is that quite often their ambition seems born out of a desire to make money and ascend the ranks of their respective professions — not for love of their work but for the show of it, for the social prestige that accompanies a high-ranking and high-paying job. I realize this is a big assertion, one that must really grate on pre-professionals, so again I’ll need to qualify it further.

The inference often made from this argument is that people who desire to make money possess cold and hollow souls. This position is not only self-gratifying but also just plain false. I know plenty of pre-professionals more atune than their liberal arts counterparts to the true pleasures of life; they just happen to take an intensely pragmatic view of things. “I want to live comfortably and well,” their line of thinking goes, “and I need money to do that.” This outlook, though in opposition to my own, is still respectable.

Here, though, is where we get into the real crux of things. At this point, my ambitions are mostly of an existential sort. I’m interested foremost in a life rich in love and experience and meaning. The realization of this life, in my mind, requires travel, a job I enjoy, an openness to others and a willingness to change things dramatically if routine ever lulls me into complacency.

The truth is, however, that there are very few of us who can maintain this kind of ambition. As Eliot reminds us, “There is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by that which lies outside of it.”

Last year, I remember reading in this paper column after column written by seniors, all of which evinced the same apprehensiveness toward graduating, entering the job market and navigating the world outside of an academic context. These columns, gloomy in tone, self-pitying in message, self-absorbed in content, became an awful burden to read. I swore to myself then that if I ever wrote a column of my own I would refrain from penning this kind of piece. Which is why I feel a slight pang of guilt now, realizing that I have done precisely that.

My own will, alas, may not be as strong as I would like to believe.