The Long Goodbye: A Memoir

by Meghan O'Rourke

I’d copied out a passage from an interview in The Paris Review with the novelist Marilynne Robinson that gave me some solace. The interviewer recalled Robinson’s having once observed that Americans tend to avoid contemplating “larger issues.” Here is what Robinson, who is a practicing Protestant, said in response: The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of it, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.