`Language a Ploughman Can Understand'

On Saturday, the gratuitous generosity of two friends soothed the tedium of house hunting. Joe of Brooklyn sent a link to a video of Geoffrey Hill reading his translation of Eugenio Montale’s “La Bufera,” “The Storm.” The poem can be found in Without Title (2006), a volume dedicated “in omaggio a Eugenio Montale.” Hill, who turns 76 in June, reads like a demon.

Forty-seven minutes later, Brian Sholis passed along the notes he made of a lecture Marilynne Robinson delivered Thursday at DePaul University in Chicago. Sponsored by the school’s Catholic Studies Program, the event was titled “My Faith and My Fiction.” Robinson read two papers, one of which will be published in the next issue of the Harvard Divinity Bulletin. Brian reports: “At the outset she noted her `abrasive resistance to what I'm being told by the culture at large.’” Here’s Brian:

“Underpinning the first paper she delivered was her assertion that nothing is as complex as the human mind, and that various deterministic theories (Freud, economic rationalism, selfish-gene theory, etc.) do harm to this fact. She doesn't understand `why human beings are so persistent in their attack on what is most distinctive about them.’ She then asserted that `if you do not believe in thought you cannot believe in faith’ and, in a swipe at Christopher Hitchens and his ilk, that `those who attack faith devalue thought.’ Later on in the essay, she praised Calvin's assertion that `an encounter with the other is always an encounter with God,’ said that she tries to live by that understanding, and stressed that reverence is the proper way of relating to the `shining garment of reality’ in which God reveals himself constantly.

“Metaphors gleaned from the world of science littered her talk, among them the idea that weaknesses in the Earth's gravitational pull might be due to a larger, unknown gravitational force pulling from outside our galaxy -- which she used to suggest that `anomalies in our thinking might be we simply do not know what is in play.’ She also mentioned dark matter in this regard. She seems to be a regular reader of the magazine Scientific American, which she cited twice.”

Robinson’s sensibility is one at home with and in mystery, a quality shared by scientists and the faithful. An acceptance of mystery implies some degree of humility in the face of the unknown. That’s what I meditated on Sunday morning while digging up seven rhododendrons and a rosemary bush the size of a Rottweiler from my brother-in-law’s front yard. Brian again:

“Later still, she said that `the act of perception is my greatest interest in life’ and that `all experience is profound; it can be perceived and not merely seen.’ `Experience befalls us’ and is `as near as we come to autonomous reality;’ language is insufficient to describe it.

“Her second talk was similar in scope but focused more on her own writing. She cited William Tyndale, who is responsible for much of the King James Bible and who `wrote in a language a ploughman can understand,’ as one inspiration for her own writing, and said that `I'm always governed by my characters when I write.’”

Brian reminds us that Robinson’s third novel, Home, is scheduled for publication in September. Her fiction and thought is anomalous in an age of codified narcissism. She challenges the lazy pigeonholing of people and thought our “culture at large” encourages. Find a copy of “Onward, Christian Liberals,” an essay Robinson published in the Spring 2006 issue of The American Scholar, reprinted in The Best American Essays 2007. Don’t neglect the clarity of Robinson’s prose, which refuses to indulge in emotionalism (in a time when the histrionic expression of extreme emotion is confused with authenticity), and squarely fits word to idea, like the parts of a Shaker chair. Read the entire essay but don’t neglect the third- and second-to-last paragraphs:

“What has personal holiness to do with politics and economics? Everything, from the liberal Protestant point of view. They are the means by which our poor and orphaned and our strangers can be sustained in real freedom, and graciously, as God requires. How can a Christian live without certainty? More fully, I suspect, than one can live with doctrines that constrict the sense of God with definitions and conditions.

“It is vision that floods the soul with the sense of holiness, vision of this world. And it is reverent attention to this world that teaches us, and teaches us again, the imperatives of ethical refinement.”

Thank you, Joe and Brian.