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Nov. 1st, 2006 06:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
decemberthirtyFrom Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson:
I don't know how many times people have asked me what death is like, sometimes when they were only an hour or two from finding out for themselves. Even when I was a very young man, people as old as I am now would ask me, hold on to my hands and look into my eyes with their old milky eyes, as if they knew I knew and they were going to make me tell them. I used to say it was like going home. We have no home in this world, I used to say, and then I'd walk back up the road to this old place and make myself a pot of coffee and a fried-egg sandwich and listen to the radio, when I got one, in the dark as often as not. Do you remember this house? I think you must, a little. I grew up in parsonages. I've lived in this one most of my life, and I've visited a good many others, because my father's friends and most of our relatives also lived in parsonages. And when I thought about it in those days, which wasn't too often, I thought this was the worst of them all, the draftiest and the dreariest. Well, that was my state of mind at the time. It's a perfectly good old house, but I was all alone in it then. And that made it seem strange to me. I didn't feel very much at home in the world, that was a fact. Now I do.
Ah, what a beautifully written book! This paragraph, right near the beginning, is so simple and so lovely; it tells us so much about this unnamed preacher: he is a quiet and a serious and a plain man, a man who has spent much time alone, and to whom the habits of loneliness still cling, despite the wife and young son he acquired late in life and loves dearly. This paragraph tells us all this, but it does so lightly--Robinson feels no need for emphasis. She is like her 76-year-old protagonist: contemplative, patient, and full of a deep faith. His faith is in God, hers in the strength of her narrative voice. I've only read fifty pages of the book, but thus far it appears that faith is not misplaced.
I don't know how many times people have asked me what death is like, sometimes when they were only an hour or two from finding out for themselves. Even when I was a very young man, people as old as I am now would ask me, hold on to my hands and look into my eyes with their old milky eyes, as if they knew I knew and they were going to make me tell them. I used to say it was like going home. We have no home in this world, I used to say, and then I'd walk back up the road to this old place and make myself a pot of coffee and a fried-egg sandwich and listen to the radio, when I got one, in the dark as often as not. Do you remember this house? I think you must, a little. I grew up in parsonages. I've lived in this one most of my life, and I've visited a good many others, because my father's friends and most of our relatives also lived in parsonages. And when I thought about it in those days, which wasn't too often, I thought this was the worst of them all, the draftiest and the dreariest. Well, that was my state of mind at the time. It's a perfectly good old house, but I was all alone in it then. And that made it seem strange to me. I didn't feel very much at home in the world, that was a fact. Now I do.
Ah, what a beautifully written book! This paragraph, right near the beginning, is so simple and so lovely; it tells us so much about this unnamed preacher: he is a quiet and a serious and a plain man, a man who has spent much time alone, and to whom the habits of loneliness still cling, despite the wife and young son he acquired late in life and loves dearly. This paragraph tells us all this, but it does so lightly--Robinson feels no need for emphasis. She is like her 76-year-old protagonist: contemplative, patient, and full of a deep faith. His faith is in God, hers in the strength of her narrative voice. I've only read fifty pages of the book, but thus far it appears that faith is not misplaced.
