I have been thinking about Marilynne Robinson lately … I met her once, briefly, after a lecture and reading. Her hair fell thick and somewhat wild past her shoulders, dark and streaked with silver greys. During the Q&A portion of the lecture I remember thinking that, whether or not I agreed with what she was saying, she had an almost overpoweringly poetic sensibility in her speech and she spoke in ways I thought could only be written: I did not want her to stop speaking. <\/p>\n
The work she is best known for is her 1980 novel Housekeeping.<\/i> When people ask me what it is about I generally respond with “women in Idaho.” That’s a cop-out: the novel’s complexities do not lend themselves to casual conversation. Which is another way of saying that it is most difficult to decide what to write about in a post on Marilynne Robinson. What I appreciate most about the novel is it’s inherently open structure\u00e2\u20ac\u201dthe text itself seems to refute any definitive or singular interpretation.<\/p>\n
And so I thought I would take this space to share a passage, just one, that I particularly enjoy. The narrator is reflecting upon the idea of loss, and specifically the death of Christ.<\/p>\n
And when He did die it was sad\u00e2\u20ac\u201dsuch a young man, so full of promise, and His mother wept and His friends could not believe the loss, and the story spread everywhere and the mourning would not be comforted, until He was so sharply lacked and so powerfully remembered that his friends felt Him beside them as they walked along the road, and saw someone cooking fish on the shore and knew it to be Him, and sat down to supper with Him, all wounded as He was…. 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. (194\u00e2\u20ac\u201c5)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
There is something beautiful to me about the idea that the loss of the physical presence of Christ could precipitate such a powerful longing as to bring Him back into the lives of his friends. (Do I miss Him? If not, why?) And the movement in the text to a more general concept of resurrection\u00e2\u20ac\u201dearlier in the novel it is termed the “resurrection of the ordinary” (18)\u00e2\u20ac\u201dwhere what is brought back is not the flash of unknown glory but instead the comfort of the familiar (and in the story, familial); that understanding of resurrection adds to my hope.<\/p>\n
When my husband read Housekeeping<\/i> on the train back and forth between the University he kept on waiting for something to happen, for the story to go somewhere. We do not all react the same to softly wandering prose. But I hope by exracting this one passage I have opened the door a bit: if you’ve never read Marilynne’s words, well, now you have; and if you have, well, please share\u00e2\u20ac\u201dwhat is it that you enjoy and why? And, of course, if there are any further thoughts on the restoration of those we have lost please feel free to share them as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have been thinking about Marilynne Robinson lately …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":94,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corn"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/94"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3465\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}