{"id":10955,"date":"2015-09-18T06:59:22","date_gmt":"2015-09-18T13:59:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/?p=10955"},"modified":"2015-09-18T11:55:37","modified_gmt":"2015-09-18T18:55:37","slug":"lit-matters-the-numinous-everyday-of-marilynne-robinson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/2015\/09\/18\/lit-matters-the-numinous-everyday-of-marilynne-robinson\/","title":{"rendered":"Lit Matters<\/em>: The numinous everyday of Marilynne Robinson"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThere are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, everyone of them sufficient,\u201d wrote Marilynne Robinson, who has been called one of America\u2019s finest living writers, despite having only published four novels in the last 35 years.<\/p>\n

Robinson\u2019s novels are themselves good reasons to be alive. Using prose that is graceful and light, she delivers a vast range of emotion and philosophy about the human condition. Her characters deal with a world that is at times indifferent to their struggles and yet still sufficient to their needs.<\/p>\n

The world of Robinson\u2019s novels, for all its wonder and beauty, doesn\u2019t give her characters, or us, an easy ride. \u201cThe ancients are right,\u201d she said, \u201cthe dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world.\u201d Yet it is in the very complexity of the world that we find the redemption for that tricky thing called experience.<\/p>\n

Robinson writes with a touching consideration for these small details of existence. The main character of Gilead<\/i>, <\/i>a dying priest who is recounting family history for his son, says that in our everyday world there is \u201cmore beauty than our eyes can bear.\u201d Revealing the extraordinary nature of our ordinary lives is one of the purposes of art, Robinson has said. \u201cCultures cherish artists because they are people who can say, Look at that. And it\u2019s not Versailles. It\u2019s a brick wall with a ray of sunlight falling on it.\u201d<\/p>\n

But this ability to see what she calls the \u201cnuminous quality\u201d of ordinary things is not just reserved for artists. \u201cIt\u2019s not an acquired skill,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s a skill that we\u2019re born with that we lose. We learn not to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n

A good place to start unlearning our blindness is the fiction of Marilynne Robinson.<\/p>\n

Marilynne Robinson must-read:
\n<\/b>Housekeeping
\n<\/i>(Public library adult fiction)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThere are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, everyone of them sufficient,\u201d wrote Marilynne Robinson, who has been called one of America\u2019s finest living writers, despite having only published four novels in the last 35 years. Robinson\u2019s novels are themselves good reasons to be alive. Using prose that is graceful and light, she […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10956,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,148],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-columns","category-september-9-2015"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10955"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10955\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10957,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10955\/revisions\/10957"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}