Photo courtesy of NASA.
I once held a summer job at an athletic club where I stood or sat for six hours a day—behind a desk or under a pool cabana—acting as front-desk-computer-baron extraordinaire (actually just one of a handful of college-aged kids whose job was to welcome people into the club, answer their questions, and ring up an occasional t-shirt or protein bar). I was not, strictly speaking, supposed to be doing anything other than that. No looking at phones, no flipping through books, nothing. But I couldn’t help myself. During slow hours or rainy weather, I managed to accidentally embark on a piecemeal philosophical journey through literature, secretly skimming the dread of Camus, the spunk of Beauvoir, the origins of the novel in Defoe, and most formatively, the essays of the novelist and Pulitzer Prize-winner Marilynne Robinson, whose collections What Are We Doing Here? and The Giveness of Things—not to mention her beautiful soon-to-be quartet of Gilead novels—tackle the issue of ideological strife in the western world with such elegant verve that I wondered for more than a half-second whether a seventy-six-year-old essayist in Iowa might consider adopting a somewhat-gainfully employed twenty-something on the basis of fervently one-sided admiration.
In all seriousness, the weight of the world is heavy on our shoulders right now. If we’re not anxiety-ridden over accidentally touching our own face mask in the grocery store, we’re eyeing the ethos of our country’s institutions, the fragility of sea levels, conflict in Yemen, the fate of the world economy, or even the fate of young graduates told on the threshold of their adult life that they might as well get used to disappointment. But I’ve been thinking back to Marilynne Robinson lately, perhaps spurred by the return of summer, or the frantic clutching of anything that gleams dimly of potential solution.
Robinson is an educator by profession, and each of her essays—though written in conversational tone and easeful confidence—doubles as a history lesson on topics as broad as American Romantics, Ancient Greek apologists, string theory, and the pedagogical shortcomings of the STEM fields, the intellectual platforms from which she launches philosophical journeys into broader subjects like “Reformation,” “Grace,” or “Memory.” A lesser writer might be accused of navel-gazing, but for Robinson, the world has always been a place of curiosity and uncertainty, and although measurable progress is necessary to ensure higher planes of justice and peace, the hunt for ultimate knowledge, she says, is part of the beauty of being a human in the universe. And not just in the realm of quantitative data.
“There are so many works of the mind, so much humanity, that to disburden ourselves of ourselves is an understandable temptation,” she writes in her essay, “Humanism”. “Open a book and a voice speaks. A world, more or less alien or welcoming, emerges to enrich a reader’s store of hypotheses about how life is to be understood. As with scientific hypotheses, even failure is meaningful, a test of the boundaries of credibility. So many voices, so many worlds, we can weary of them. If there were only one human query to be heard in the universe, and it was only the sort of thing we were always inclined to wonder about—Where did all this come from? or, Why could we never refrain from war?—we would hear in it a beauty that would overwhelm us.”
Now, on the magazine cover to my left, I see four words lying flat on my desk: “Look Closer, Discover More.” Sound familiar? Here at Country Roads, in the stories we seek out each month, it’s easy to feel close to the notion that rejoicing in knowledge of the world around us—the world that made us—is the first step to bringing into harbor the future waiting just beyond the horizon. As June passes through its midpoint, and the latter half of the year approaches, we can only hope in these times to serve as an accompaniment to broad celebration, individual inquiry, and a chorus to Robinson’s belief that “[s]omeday we will walk out onto a crowded street and hear that joyful noise we must hope to do nothing to darken or still, having learned so recently that humankind is fragile, and wonderful.”
