Gilead
Written by Barb Monday, 18 December 2006 00:00
Here's a good gift idea for anyone on your list who's spiritually inclined. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. It won the 2005 Pultizer Prize for fiction. I'm going to give it to my friend Eve, the pastor of the Mennonite Church here. I can't decide if I want to give her my copy with its dogeared pages and hightlighting or if I should buy her a new one so she can read a clean version. I like sharing used books among friends, especially close ones because it's interesting to see the parts they thought were especially good --which passages spoke most to them personally, ya know? It's a nice experience, a kind of literary intimacy. On the other hand, it can also be distracting to read a book that's got a lot of notes and stuff already in it and there's something to be said for reading a clean version to put your own highlighting and dogears in and then comparing notes afterward.
I think I'll go with the former just so I can re-read this copy over the next few days. I had a lot going on when I read it the first time so I read it in spurts, which is fine too because it's one of those books that breaks up easily into nuggets that are good to chew on for a bit, but now I'd like to spend an entire day with it again to get the parts I missed. Sometimes you miss the connections when you pick a book up and put it down again a hundred times in the course of a reading.
The book is a letter from a dying man --a minister in a long line of theologians-- to his young son: partly reflections on life and spirituality, partly stories of his childhood and his father and grandfather, and partly him trying to work out what to do about his own relationship with his estranged god-son (note god-son, not the son to whom the letter is addressed). It's like reading the journal of a very thoughtful, considerate, exceedingly honest friend whose writing mirrors the mental process of working things out inside their own head. I like that sort of transparency in writing wherever I find it.
And then there are these wonderful insights such as this one that I thought was very cool:
Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable --which I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. ... Maybe I should have said we are like planets. But then I would have lost some of the point of saying that we are like civilizations. The planets may all have been sloughed from the same star, but still the historical dimension is missing from that simile, and it is true that we all do live in the ruins of the lives of other generations, so there is a seeming continuity which is important.... (197-198).
I really like that idea of continuity. It's a novel idea to me --continuity with other generations-- because in my own life I seem so different from the rest of my family. Then again who knows? There were so many of them I didn't ever get to know really. Especially my grandma Getty. (She died when I was eight) Sometimes I think we would have a lot in common if she were around today.
"We all live in the ruins of the lives of other generations". Wow. I mean even literally my being here today was a result of my grandmother making the decision to leave Scotland and come to the Americas. She wasn't thinking of me necessarily. I'm sure she was thinking of a job. I'm standing in the midst of the remains of her dreams for a better life in the New World.
In a way then I'm right where she was all that time ago. I could leave this country and go to Colombia or Spain and build my life there and whichever thing I choose is going to lay the foundations for my kids. They'll (probably) either have Latin American ancestors or European ones. And they'll live their lives surrounded by the consequences of my dream of leaving the Empire.
See? You could write several posts just about any one particular reflection contained in this book. It's like a good collection of spiritual reflections written in the form of a letter. I think I'll try to check out her other book, Housekeeping to see if it's just as good.