Marilynne Robinson on Facing Reality

Further to my last post, I read another of Marilynne Robinson’s essays from The Death of Adam today, Facing Reality. The shock of reading these essays is not easy to catch. The total inadequacy of my own writing, and indeed the gulf between this and other contemporary non-fiction prose is shocking. I have read these before yet the shock is all the greater on rereading.

I will take some of the highlights and hope it inspires anyone not already in possession of them to get a hold of a copy.

Anyone who reads and writes history or economics or science must sometimes wonder what fiction is, where its boundaries are, if they exist at all. [...]

Yet we have put together among ourselves a rigidly simple account of life in the world, which we honor with the name Reality and which, we now assure one another, must be faced and accepted, even or especially at the cost of those very things which societies which we admire are believed by us to value, for example education, the arts, a humane standard of life for the whole of the community. Science fetches back from its explorations mystery upon mystery, yet somehow we fee increasingly sunk in the world of mere things, in a hard-edged reality that disallows imagination except to extract tribute from it, in portraits which assert its own power and ferocity, or interludes and recreations which concede with their triviality that only Reality matters. Our present model of the world is a fiction, based on notions of objectivity and of the character and implications of science which are a hundred years out of date. It is based on the flotsam and detritus and also the floor sweepings of all disciplines—psychology, penology, economics, history, all of them.

[My emphasis. See previous post, Cheapening Life]

I depart here from what I hope is a tone of moderation for a long moment of parenthetical candor. As a fiction writer I feel smothered by this collective fiction, this Reality. I do not admire or enjoy it, this work of grim and minor imagination which somehow or other got itself acknowledged as The Great Truth and The Voice of Our Time because of rather than despite its obvious thinness and fraudulence. So I give it a bad review, in the spirit of cankered optimism which moves all indignant reviewers. [...]

Lately Americans have enjoyed pretending they are powerless, disenfranchised individually and deep in decline as a society, perhaps to grant themselves latitude that responsible people do not have or desire. In fact, our ability to do harm, by act or omission, is great beyond all reckoning, and greater by our refusal to accept this fact and its implications. Powerless people can hardly demand coherency of themselves, since they must always react to forces they cannot trust, whose wiles they cannot anticipate. They are safe from responsibility, safe from blame. [...]

Here is one topic on which the topic of anxiety can be considered. As a culture we are terrified of illness, though as people we are rather safe from it. [...] It is as if we took morphine to help us sleep on a bed of nails.

The essay concludes:

We weep human tears, like Hamlet, like Hebuca. If the universe is only all we have so far seen, we are its greatest marvel. I consider it an honor to follow Saint Francis or William Tyndale or Angelina Grimke or Lydia Maria Child anywhere, even to mere extinction. I am honored in the cunning of my hand. This being human—people have loved it through plague and famine and siege. And dante, who knew the world about suffering, had a place in hell for people who were grave when they might have rejoiced.