Marilynne Robinson and the Project of Imaginative Compassion

Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, stop it now, and check out from the library or buy on Amazon all the novels of Marilynne Robinson.  There are only three of them: Housekeeping, Gilead, and Home.  They will improve you, I promise.  Truly, there is no wiser, more generous, more patient, or (therefore) more powerful voice in literature.  I would describe her wisdom as devastating--her insights are so pure, so true, so right, that one trembles before them and begins to get a sense (in our non-theistic times) of what the ancients might actually have been up to in describing, and prescribing, a righteous fear of God.  That may sound like giddy overstatement, and I suppose it is, but she is the first writer in some time who has left me saying, My God, this is what literature can do.  Of course, literature can do other things as well--goodness knows I believe deeply in more volcanic stuff, Rushdie, Bellow, William Kennedy, etc.--but Robinson's great project of imaginative compassion is simply unparalleled in its directness, humility, clarity and moral force.  I've long had the sense that art can save us; if you are committed to the idea that it cannot, I wish you luck in maintaining your view upon reading Robinson.

Ashes

Friends, you haven't lived until you've had an infusion of chemotherapy drugs on Ash Wednesday.

I find I am crazily moved by the joy of ashes.  Gorgeous ashes, silvery, strange and potent.  Why would ash ever be an emblem of denial or irretrievable failure?  Ash proves a great success of burning; ash is memory.  We are made of ash, and this is beautiful news.

What a fearsome, magnificent, poetical day.