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There is so little to remember of anyone—an anecdote, a conversation at a table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming habitual fondness not having meant to keep us waiting long."
Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (was reminded of this quote thanks to an Atlantic article; I think some Robinson rereads are long overdue for me) -
I have to give other lectures, and I have chosen very ambitious subjects for those lectures, and I have three more that I consider to be very major. But I am also working on a novel. And I’m very well into it."
Marilynne Robinson, in an interview with Joe Fassler (please read this whole thing, then rejoice with me over those last fourteen words above) -
The advice I give my students is the same advice I give myself—forget definition, forget assumption, watch. We inhabit, we are part of, a reality for which explanation is much too poor and small. No physicist would dispute this, though he or she might be less ready than I am to have recourse to the old language and call reality miraculous. By my lights, fiction that does not acknowledge this at least tacitly is not true. Why is it possible to speak of fiction as true or false? I have no idea. But if a time comes when I seem not to be making the distinction with some degree of reliability in my own work, I hope someone will be kind enough to let me know."
Marilynne Robinson, “Reclaiming a Sense of the Sacred”, The Chronicle of Higher Education (I just keep finding more!) -
My point is that lacking the terms of religion, essential things cannot be said. Jefferson’s words acknowledge an essential mystery in human nature and circumstance. He does this by evoking the old faith that God knows us in ways we cannot know ourselves, and that he values us in ways we cannot value ourselves or one another because our intuition of the sacred is so radically limited. It is not surprising that the leader of a revolution taking place on the edge of a little-known continent, a man clearly intent on helping to create a new order of things, would attempt an anthropology that could not preclude any good course history might take. Jefferson says that we are endowed with “certain” rights, and that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are “among these.” He does not claim to offer an exhaustive list. Indeed he draws attention to the possibility that other “unalienable” rights might be added to it. And he gives us that potent phrase “the pursuit of happiness.” We are to seek our well-being as we define our well-being and determine for ourselves the means by which it might be achieved.
This epochal sentence is a profound acknowledgment of the fact that we don’t know what we are. If Jefferson could see our world, he would surely feel confirmed in the intuition that led him to couch his anthropology in such open language. Granting the evils of our time, we must also grant the evils of his and the cultural constraints that so notoriously limited his vision. Yet, brilliantly, he factors this sense of historical and human limitation into a compressed, essential statement of human circumstance, making a strength and a principle of liberation of his and our radically imperfect understanding.
"Marilynne Robinson, “A Common Faith”, Guernica (one of the few writers whose every sentence resonates with me completely. I can’t wait for the new essay collection, from which this one is excerpted.) -
The alienation, the downright visceral frustration, of the new American ideologues, the bone in their craw, is the unacknowledged fact that America has never been an especially capitalist country. The postal system, the land-grant provision for public education, the national park system, the Homestead Act, the graduated income tax, the Social Security system, Medicare, Medicaid, the GI Bill—all these were and are massive distributions or redistributions of wealth meant to benefit the population at large. Even “the electrification of the whole country,” Lenin’s great and unrealized dream for the Soviet Union, was achieved in the United States by a federal program begun in 1936. Europeans are generally unaware of the degree to which state governments provide education, healthcare, libraries and other services that complement or supplement federal programs, as do counties, cities and other political entities. Because many American states are larger than many countries, their contributions are by no means inconsiderable.
These old and characteristic American arrangements do not fit well with a strict construction of the word “capitalist,” as the neocapitalists would understand it. They reflect nothing more ideological than consensus, varying among states and regions, about how best to “promote the general welfare,” a role of the federal government stipulated in the Preamble to the Constitution. These arrangements are pragmatic in nature, and therefore expressive of an effective freedom at odds with ideology. But the ideologues consider such things a straying from the true path. And who has led the march to decline? (Decline is a big concept, apparently based on the assumption that America, unlike every nation that has existed on earth, and despite its history, will never have grave problems to deal with, except those that portend a fall into the everlasting dustbin. So any problem can be seen as grounds for outright panic or at best apocalyptic gloom.) But who is to blame? The government, of course, especially when it is run by Democrats, and by Republicans who now and then act like Democrats.
"Marilynne Robinson, “Night Thoughts of a Baffled Humanist”, The Nation (As with any Marilynne Robinson essay, you really need to read this whole thing. Come on, what else were you going to do on your lunch break?)
