This summer, among the piles of lesser literature I hauled on vacation, was one of those books I had been intending to read for some time but just hadn’t gotten around to it.
I don’t know if you’re like me in this regard, but I have a ponderous stack of books on my bedside table, and sometimes I am less than systematic about making my way through it. I tossed about half the stack into a book bag this summer. They traveled with me to Montreat and then to a succession of beaches down the coast of South Carolina and Georgia. And when I returned home and dumped out the bag, along with some stray sand, this book remained unread. I knew it was better for me than the Sookie Stackhouse novels I’d read (the novels on which the HBO series “True Blood” are based), better even than Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, but I just hadn’t gotten to it.
Until then, that is. But when I began reading this book, I remembered all over again why I love to read. I was struck again, as if for the first time, by the lyrical beauty of the English language and the sheer joy of ideas.
The book, you ask? Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998). In addition to essays on Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Darwinism, Puritans, prigs and Psalm Eight, the book boasts the most remarkable “Introduction” anywhere. I’m going to quote just one paragraph and leave you to it:
Robinson writes:
“I want to overhear passionate arguments about what we are and what we are doing and what we ought to do. I want to feel that art is an utterance made in good faith by one human being to another. I want to believe there are geniuses scheming to astonish the rest of us, just for the pleasure of it. I miss civilization, and I want it back.” (p. 4).
So do I! Let’s go get it!
