The Givenness of Things: Essays

by Marilynne Robinson

However sound our credentials seem, we have it on good authority that the prostitutes and sinners might well enter heaven before us.

Gun sales stimulate gun sales—a splendid business model, no doubt about that. Fear operates as an appetite or an addiction. You can never be safe enough.

I have lived in Massachusetts and other foreign countries. My command of French is not absolutely minimal. I have degrees from elite institutions. I am a professor in a secular university. All in all I am a pretty good example of the sort who inspire fight-or-flight responses in certain segments of the population. I find myself musing over this from time to time.

Since American intellectual culture is an endless corridor of funhouse mirrors, we don’t know what Karl Marx did know, that the cotton economy of the South was altogether the creature of British industrial capitalism.

My point is simply that the distinction, which is still very sharply drawn, between the physical and the nonphysical, is an important error, understandable in 1400 but inexcusable now. It has spiritualized the soul out of meaningful existence and de-spiritualized the world into an object of contempt at worst, or, more typically, a thing defined by its difference from anything called spiritual, which includes, as I have said, almost everything that is distinctively human.

Existence is remarkable, actually incredible. At least tacitly, awareness of this fact is as prevalent in contemporary science as it is in the Book of Psalms, the Book of Job. Those who follow such things will be aware, for example, that reputable scientists can hypothesize other universes where beings precisely ourselves live out other lives, or where our consciousness subsists immortally. Our reality might in fact be a hologram.

What a thing is man.