A great profile of the novelist Marilynne Robinson in the New York Times a few days ago begins like this:
This June, as a grandfather clock rang the quarter-hour in her modest Iowa City living room, the American novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson, a woman of 70 who speaks in sentences that accumulate into polished paragraphs, made a confession: “I hate to say it, but I think a default posture of human beings is fear.” Perched on the edge of a sofa, hands loosely clasped, Robinson leaned forward as if breaking bad news to a gentle heart. “What it comes down to — and I think this has become prominent in our culture recently — is that fear is an excuse: ‘I would like to have done something, but of course I couldn’t.’
Fear. It's amazing how often it holds us back, largely because we don't realize our own greatness, our deep resources, our resilience, and the magnificent purposes we can enact in this life. Marilynne Robinson is a believer in who we are, in our most fundamental souls. She's a religious novelist who has the rare, uncanny ability to depict goodness in compelling ways.
I wanted to bring this essay to your attention because I enjoyed it so much and I suspect you might, as well. In it, she says such things as:
“Being and human beings,” Robinson told me, “are invested with a degree of value that we can’t honor appropriately. An overabundance that is magical.”
It's good to be reminded of our astonishing core value, as human beings, in a world that often ignores it in so many ways, in favor of counterfeit values.
Robinson is a person who, learning her own value, and realizing the value that the rest of us embody, has not let any form of fear hold her back, but has launched out into a brave venture of writing that can show us, in subtle adumbrations, who we really are. And her honest boldness has garnered her both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Humanities Medal, in addition to many critical accolades.
Go check out her books here. I've started with Gilead.
I think you'd enjoy reading about her. It may spark a new sense of value in your life.
Today.
