'This Is an Interesting Planet'

My youngest son finished reading Marilynne Robinson’s 2004 novel Gilead and texted me a favorite passage you can find on pages 27-28. It’s lengthy and has to do with water, Ludwig Feuerbach and the value of paying attention. The Rev. John Ames remembers noticing a young couple while he walks to church one day. The rain has stopped and the man reaches up to shake a dripping branch – “plain exuberance” -- soaking the woman. Ames thinks she is angered by her hair and clothing getting wet, but he's wrong: 

“It was a beautiful thing to see, like something from a myth. I don’t know why I thought of that now, except perhaps because it is easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily for growing vegetables or doing the wash. I wish I had paid more attention to it. My list of regrets may seem unusual, but who can know that they are, really. This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.”

 

An elderly Congregationalist pastor in Iowa in 1956, Ames is one of the most attractive characters in American fiction. His voice carries the novel, written in the form of a long memoir-like letter to his seven-year-old son. Ames regrets not paying sufficient attention to creation – a regret many of us share. Such attentiveness – call it curiosity or engagement with our surrounding -- is a form of reverence and gratitude, and likewise an admission of willful ignorance: we learn little when we ignore our world. There’s so much more we might know had we been paying attention. The concluding two sentences are the essence of the passage David shared with me.

 

Collected in her 2018 collection What Are We Doing Here? is the essay “Grace and Beauty.” Robinson’s thinking is by nature metaphorical. She begins with an observation from physics and applies it to human understanding and its place in creation:

 

“The fact is that I have begun to feel both intrigued and comforted by the thought of everything we do not know, which is almost everything. The 95 percent of the mass of the universe that is dark matter holds the galaxies together, so they say. It is like a parable, this aloof and unknowable power sustaining us, the patron, so to speak, of the

spangled heavens, which are so grand to our sight, and baubles when the universe is thought of whole.”

 

There are at least two ways to look at ignorance. It can be entrenched,  second nature, or the result of a difficult life. It can be prideful. In the vernacular it’s carelessly used as a synonym for stupidity, but intelligent people, too, are ignorant of many things. No one is an absolute polymath. Think of ignorance as the absence of knowledge. I am ignorant of Sanskrit and the rules that govern football. Then there’s a sense in which all humans are ignorant. We are surrounded by mysteries that defy the tools available to us, science and religion. Robinson goes on contemplating dark matter:

 

“Whatever it is, it is utterly unlike the matter that is familiar to us, so I have read. How excellent it is that anything could be so unforeseen. And just as excellent, and fully as remarkable, that humankind has managed to catch a glimpse of it. Increasingly, I think of the mind and the universe as one great system, and the unknown and uncomprehended in their infinite variety as sutures, fontanels, that accommodate the growth of human awareness. I’m thinking of the sutures in the skull, of course, that foresee and permit the great expansion of the brain unique to our species.”