I have been rereading some of Marilynne Robinson’s essays from The Death of Adam. It is difficult to do justice to them and I won’t try, but I would like to quote three paragraphs from her introduction. Knowing how I read on line, I am going to do this over three days. Her prose needs to be the read in the old fashioned way rather than scanned, and I thought by breaking it up this way I and my readers would have a better chance of assimilating it.
It all comes down to the mystery of the relationship between the mind and the cosmos. Those who would employ reductive definitions of utility or reality credit their own perceptions of truth with fundamentalist simple-heartedness, brooking no allusion to complexities and ambiguities and countervailing experience. But if the mind is able to tell us what is true, why not credit its attempts at higher truth? And if its intuitions in these matters seem often to be in error, even to those who do not by any means wish to dismiss them, are not its intuitions always very substantially in error even in matters of science and economics? Is it not in fact a very naive conception of reality, and of its accessibility to human understanding, that would exclude so much of what human beings have always found meaningful, as if by this means fallibility or error or delusion could be localized and rejected?
Meditation: Marilynne Robinson on Civilization (i)