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Executive Times |
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2005 Book Reviews |
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Gilead
by Marilyn Robinson |
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Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Legacy The narrator of Marilyn Robinson’s
novel, Gilead,
is a 76 year old preacher who has spent his life in Here’s an excerpt, pp. 51-57: A few days ago you and
your mother came home with flowers. I knew where you had been. Of course she
takes you up there, to get you a little used to the place. And I hear she’s
made it very pretty, too. She’s a thoughtful woman. You had honeysuckle, and
you showed me how to suck the nectar out of the blossoms. You would bite the
little tip off a flower and then hand it to me, and I pretended I didn’t know
how to go about it, and I would put the whole flower in my mouth, and pretend
to chew it and swallow it, or I’d act as if it were a little whistle and try
to blow through it, and you’d laugh and laugh and say, No! no!
no!! And then I pretended I had a bee buzzing around
in my mouth, and you said, “No, you don’t, there wasn’t any bee!” and I
grabbed you around the shoulders and blew into your ear and you jumped up as
though you thought maybe there was a bee after all, and you laughed, and then
you got serious and you said, “I want you to do this.” And then you put your
hand on my cheek and touched the flower to my lips, so gently and carefully,
and said, “Now sip.” You said, “You have to take your medicine.” So I did,
and it tasted exactly like honeysuckle, just the way it did when I was your
age and it seemed to grow on every fence post and porch railing in creation. I was struck by the way
the light felt that afternoon. I have paid a good deal of attention to light,
but no one could begin to do it justice. There was the feeling of a weight of
light—pressing the damp out of the grass and pressing the smell of sour old
sap out of the boards on the porch floor and burdening even the trees a
little as a late snow would do. It was the kind of light that rests on your
shoulders the way a cat lies on your lap. So
familiar. Old Soapy was lying in the sun, plastered to the sidewalk. You
remember Soapy. I don’t really know why you should. She is a very
unremarkable animal. I’ll take a picture of her. So there we were, sipping
honeysuckle till suppertime, and your mother brought out the camera, so maybe
you will have some pictures. The film ran out before I could get a shot of
her. That’s just typical. Sometimes if I try to photograph her she’ll hide
her face in her hands, or she’ll just walk out of the room. She doesn’t think
she’s a pretty woman. I don’t know where she got these ideas about herself,
and I don’t think I ever will know, either. Sometimes I’ve wondered why she’d
marry an old man like me, a fine, vital woman like she is. I’d never have
thought to ask her to marry me. I would never have dared to. It was her idea.
I remind myself of that often. She reminds me of it, too. I’d never have believed
I’d see a wife of mine doting on a child of mine. It still amazes me every
time I think of it. I’m writing this in part to tell you that if you ever
wonder what you’ve done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or
later, you have been God’s grace to me, a miracle, something more than a
miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to
be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby
little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell
you. There’s a shimmer on a
child’s hair, in the sunlight. There are rainbow colors in it, tiny, soft
beams of just the same colors you can see in the dew sometimes. They’re in
the petals of flowers, and they’re on a child’s skin. Your hair is straight
and dark, and your skin is very fair. I suppose you’re not prettier than most
children. You’re just a nice-looking boy, a bit slight, well scrubbed and
well mannered. All that is fine, but it’s your existence I love you for,
mainly. Existence seems to me now the most remarkable thing that could ever
be imagined. I’m about to put on imperishability. In an instant, in the
twinkling of an eye. The twinkling of an eye.
That is the most wonderful expression. I’ve thought from time to time it was
the best thing in life, that little incandescence you see in people when the
charm of a thing strikes them, or the humor of it. “The light of the eyes rejoiceth the heart.” That’s a fact. While you read this, I am
imperishable, somehow more alive than I have ever been, in the strength of my
youth, with dear ones beside me. You read the dreams of an anxious, fuddled
old man, and I live in a light better than any dream of mine—not waiting for
you, though, because I want your dear perishable self to live long and to
love this poor perishable world, which I somehow cannot imagine not missing
bitterly, even while I do long to see what it will mean to have wife and
child restored to me, I mean Louisa and Rebecca. I have wondered about that
for many years. Well, this old seed is about to drop into the ground. Then
I’ll know. I have a few pictures of
Louisa, but I don’t think the resemblance is very good. Considering that I
haven’t seen her in fifty-one years, I guess I can’t really judge. When she
was nine or ten she used to skip rope like fury, and if you tried to distract
he; she would just turn away, still jumping, and never miss a lick. Her
braids would bounce and thump on her back. Sometimes I’d try to catch hold of
one of them, and then she’d be off down the street, still skipping. She would
be trying to make it to a thousand, or to a million, and nothing could distract
her. It said in my mother’s home health book that a young girl should not be
allowed to make that sort of demand on her strength, but when I showed Louisa
the very page on which those words were printed, she just told me to mind my
own business. She was always running around barefoot with her braids flying
and her bonnet askew. I don’t know when girls stopped wearing sunbonnets, or
why they ever did wear them. If they were supposed to keep off freckles, I
can tell you they didn’t work. I’ve always envied men who
could watch their wives grow old. Boughton lost his
wife five years ago, and he married before I did. His oldest boy has
snow-white hair. His grandchildren are mostly married. And as for me, it is
still true that I will never see a child of mine grow up and I will never see
a wife of mine grow old. I’ve shepherded a good many people through their
lives, I’ve baptized babies by the hundred, and all that time I have felt as
though a great part of life was closed to me. Your mother says I was like
Abraham. But I had no old wife and no promise of a child. I was just getting
by on books and baseball and fried-egg sandwiches. You and the cat have
joined me in my study. Soapy is on my lap and you are on your belly on the
floor in a square of sunlight, drawing airplanes. Half an hour ago you were
on my lap and Soapy was on her belly in the square of sunlight. And while you
were on my lap you drew—so you told me—a Messerschmitt 109. That is it in
the corner of the page. You know all the names from a book Leon Fitch gave
you about a month ago, when my back was turned, as it seems to me, since he
could not, surely, have imagined I’d approve. All your drawings look about
like that one in the corner but you give them different names-Spad and Fokker and Zero. You’re always trying to get me
to read the fine print about how many guns they have and how many bombs they
carry. If my father were here, if I were my father, I’d find a way to make
you think that the noble and manly thing would be to give the book back to
old Fitch. I really should do that. But he means well. Maybe I’ll just hide
the thing in the pantry. When did you figure out about the pantry? That’s
where we always put anything we don’t want you getting into. Now that I think
about it, half the things in that pantry were always there so one or another
of us wouldn’t get into them. I could have married again
while I was still young. A congregation likes to have a married minister,
and I was introduced to every niece and sister-in-law in a hundred miles. In
retrospect, I’m very grateful for whatever reluctance it was that kept me
alone until your mother came. Now that I look back, it seems to me that in
all that deep darkness a miracle was preparing. So I am right to remember it
as a blessed time, and myself as waiting in confidence, even if I had no idea
what I was waiting for. Then when your mother did
come, when I still hardly knew her, she gave me that look of hers—no twinkle
in that eye—and said, very softly and very seriously, “You ought to marry
me.” That was the first time in my life I ever knew what it was to love
another human being. Not that I hadn’t loved people before. But I hadn’t
realized what it meant to love them before. Not even my parents. Not
even Louisa. I was so startled when she said that to me that for a minute I
couldn’t find any words to reply. So she walked away, and I had to follow
her along the street. I still didn’t have the courage to touch her sleeve,
but I said, “You’re right, I will.” And she said, “Then I’ll see you
tomorrow,” and kept on walking. That was the most thrilling thing that ever
happened to me in my life. I could wish you such a moment as that one was, though when I think of everything that came before
it, for me and for your dear mother, too, I’m not sure I should. Here I am trying to be
wise, the way a father should be, the way an old pastor certainly should be.
I don’t know what to say except that the worst misfortune isn’t only
misfortune—and even as I write those words, I have that infant Rebecca in my
mind, the way she looked while I held her, which I seem to remember~ because
every single time I have christened a baby I have thought of her again. That
feeling of a baby’s brow against the palm of your hand—how I have loved this
life. Boughton had christened her, as I said, but I
laid my hand on her just to bless her, and I could feel her pulse, her
warmth, the damp of her hair. The Lord said, “Their angels in Heaven always
see the face of my Father in Heaven” (Matthew 18:10). That’s why Boughton named her Angeline.
Many, many people have found comfort in that verse. I have been thinking about
existence lately. In fact, I have been so full of admiration for existence
that I have hardly been able to enjoy it properly. As I was walking up to the
church this morning, I passed that row of big oaks by the war memorial— if
you remember them—and I thought of another morning, fall a year or two ago,
when they were dropping their acorns thick as hail almost. There was all sorts of thrashing in the leaves and there were
acorns hitting the pavement so hard they’d fly past my head. All this in the
dark, of course. I remember a slice of moon, no more than that. It was a
very clear night, or morning, very still, and then there was such energy in
the things transpiring among those trees, like a storm, like travail. I stood
there a little out of range, and I thought, It is all still new to me. I have
lived my life on the prairie and a line of oak trees can still astonish me. I feel sometimes as if I
were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it
will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know
this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only
lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can’t believe that,
when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget
our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream
of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity
this world will be Lacey Thrush died last
night. Isn’t that a name? Her mother was a Lacey. They were an old family
here, but she was the last of the Laceys, and the
Thrushes went on to The spirituality in Gilead
is contemplative, and readers who patiently read a paragraph at a time, and
reflect on what was read will find great pleasure, truth, beauty and insight
on these pages. Steve Hopkins,
July 25, 2005 |
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ã 2005 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the August 2005
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Gilead.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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