`Finding What Will Suffice'

At age 9 or 10 I foolishly asked my mother what sort of job would permit me to do nothing but read books. She laughed – raucously, I thought. She and my father were not readers. To them, a book was a guilty distraction, a waste of time. The few volumes on her shelves were bestsellers, circa 1940, when she was college-age but not in college and not yet married. Not for many years would I meet anyone whose bookish hunger matched my own. Marilynne Robinson, it seems, shares the hunger. In an interview she gave last year at Eastern Washington University, the author of The Death of Adam and Gilead said:

“I get something on my mind or I pick up a book that seems to call my name, and I read something I didn’t know before or something that makes a better text, a better fabric of something I had known for some other reason. And it just feels good. It’s an enormous pleasure to me. If I could, I would just read and read and read. All kinds of strange things. Difficult things that make me feel that my perspective is richer than it was before. As far as writing goes, every once in a while I feel like I have to write something. I am the driven slave of these two impulses. It’s a nice life.”

Robinson describes with weird precision my relations with books, the way they spark anticipation and hope, revise my thinking and preserve my status as a work-in-progress. Each new book, or old book revisited, fashions new neural connections. A good book is another blow against entropy, and Robinson is right to celebrate difficult books, the always reliable antidote to dullness and passivity. In 1984, she published a brief essay, “Hum Inside the Skull,” in the New York Times Book Review. She celebrates the work of Dickinson, Melville, Thoreau, Whitman and Emerson:

“Nothing in literature appeals to me more than the rigor with which they fasten on problems of language, or consciousness -- bending form to their purposes, ransacking ordinary speech and common experience, . . . always, to borrow a phrase from Wallace Stevens, in the act of finding what will suffice. I think they must have believed everything can be apprehended truly when seen in the light of an esthetic understanding appropriate to itself, whence their passion for making novel orders of disparate things. I believe they wished to declare the intrinsic dignity of all experience and to declare the senses bathed in revelation -- true, serious revelation, the kind that terrifies.”

The American experiment was something new and unprecedented, and it still seems remarkable that our fledgling nation produced this concentrated shower of genius, to which I would add the slightly younger Mark Twain and Henry James. This “making novel orders of disparate things” describes their various aesthetic approaches and the pragmatic, amateur, improvisatory, do-it-yourself faith of the American strategy at its finest. Here’s Thoreau in his Journal for March 13, 1841:

“There is a sort of homely truth and naturalness in some books, which is very rare to find, and yet looks quite cheap.

“There may be nothing lofty in the sentiment – or polished in the expression – but it is careless – countrified talk. The scholar rarely writes as well as the farmer talks. Homeliness is a great merit in a book – it is next to beauty and a high art.”

Such homeliness is not inconsistent with subtlety of thought and elegance of expression. Here’s Robinson again, from her essay “Psalm Eight,” collected in The Death of Adam:

“So I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes. I think the concept of transcendence is based on a misreading of creation. With all respect to heaven, the scene of miracle is here, among us. The eternal as an idea is much less preposterous than time, and this very fact should seize our attention. In certain contexts the improbable is called the miraculous.”