LITTLE ROCK — At the very outset of her new book of essays, When I Was a Child I Read Books (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26), novelist Marilynne Robinson looks around and assesses the landscape, noticing that “we now live in a political environment characterized by wolfishness and filled with blather.”
She is borrowing vocabulary from Walt Whitman, whose 1871 essay “Democratic Vistas” she’d invoked the paragraph before, and whose spirit of self-interrogation combined with cosmic involvement informs the Decalogue of essays that follow. Whitman is a touchstone for Robinson; she dusts him off to make the point that the country has survived lupine seasons before and that “we are blessed with the impossibility of arriving at a definition of America that is either exhaustive or final.”
Much of what Robinson writes about here may seem arcane to a lot of readers - she assumes the reader will be almost as familiar with her subjects as she is herself,which can lead to trouble when one is talking about such figures as John Calvin, Moses and Bishop John Shelby Spong. But that shouldn’t scare off the dipper-in. She directs some devastating good sense at much of the received wisdom of modernity, the passion for pseudo-science and feel-good religiosity of the present day.
Robinson has no patience for oversimplification and self-affirming readings. She delivers her lessons with the confidence of a law-giver and with finely tuned, calibrated sentences that feel more 19th century than 21st. At least part of the joy of reading her stems from the simple appreciation of the fine-made thing - her words are balanced, measured and delivered in time and harmony. She takes her time and arranges arguments artfully, quietly building impressive battlements from which she might take her shots.
Most of the shots she takes are in defense of things she loves, such as poor old Calvin, the Protestant reformer who is often dismissed as the dour Frenchman who came up with the idea of “unconditional election,” a doctrine that holds that before God created the world he decided to save some people for his own purposes while allowing the rest of us to burn in hell.
But Robinson identifies a liberal spirit in Calvin, “an ethics of nonjudgmental, nonexclusive generosity” that she contends has been central to American social and political thought since the Puritans. She expands on this notion in the devastating essay “Wondrous Love,” in which she demolishes the fiscally convenient link between religious piety and economic conservatism with two simple sentences:
“In my Bible, Jesus does not say, ‘I was hungry andyou fed me, though not in such a way as to interfere with free-market principles,’” Robinson writes. “Until there is evidence that ideology mattered to Jesus, it will be of no interest to me.”
Similarly, while Robinson decries the reflexive condescension with which some educated liberals regard religion, she has no time for faith-based shibboleths. “Creationism is the best thing that could have happened to Darwinism,” she writes, “the caricature of religion that has seemed to justify Darwinist contempt for the whole of religion.”
And so one of our finest novelists (Housekeeping, Gilead) emerges as an interesting and powerful thinker with the refreshing habit of debunking the laziness inherent in the reflexive Manichaeism that tends to divide people into camps and reduce ideas to rooting interests. Robinson is an oldline Presbyterian and has no problem reconciling her faith with a progressive social agenda. She is an intellectual who admits nuance and mystery into the world. She lives in a place where science needn’t nullify religion and where every assumption and received truth deserves rigorous scrutiny.
“At a certain point I decided that everything I took from studying and reading anthropology, psychology, economics, cultural history and so on did not square at all with my sense of things, and that the tendency of much of it was to posit or assume a human simplicity within a simple reality and to marginalize the sense of the sacred, the beautiful, everything in any way lofty,” she writes, by way of explaining her novelist’s interest in the ineffable.
It is this combination of intellectual rigor and suspension of cynicism that marks Robinson as an original and valuable voice. Even when one doesn’t agree with her - and it seems unlikely that anyone would agree with Marilynne Robinson on every point - she argues beautifully and almost entirely without malice.While she indulges her own ideologies, she understands that the world of practice and the world of ideas are neither mutually exclusive or necessarily antagonistic.
She writes that, in her classes at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she advises her students to “forget definition, forget assumption, watch.”
If there is a better motto, it is beyond my imagining. The world plays out before us and we confabulate reasons and manufacture meaning from the incomplete informationwe have on hand. We can rely on intellectual mascots and show shouters to do our thinking for us or we can stand witness. Facts alone are inadequate, but sometimes they are all we have. We do the best we can.
In the title essay, which is about Robinson’s awakening as a reader growing up in Idaho, she uses a beautiful extended metaphor (crediting her Latin teacher at Coeur D’Alene High School) about a pearl diver who finds “a piece of ancient statuary under the Mediterranean, a figure immune to the crush of depth though up to its waist in sand and blue with cold ... its eyes blank with astonishment, its lips parted to make a sound in some lost dialect, its hand lifted to a city long since lost beyond indifference.”
“The diver might feel pity at finding so human a thing in so cold a place. It mightbe his privilege to react with a sharper recognition than anyone in the living world could do, though he had never heard the name of Phidias or Myron. The things we learned were in the same way, merely given for us to make what meaning we could of them.” E-mail: pmartin@arkansasonline.com
Style, Pages 45 on 03/25/2012