Marilynne Robinson
September 14th, 2008 by fieldus
Excellent interview with Robinson in The Paris Review.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve also written that Americans tend to avoid contemplating larger issues. What is it that we’re afraid of?ROBINSON
People are frightened of themselves. It’s like Freud saying that the best thing is to have no sensation at all, as if we’re supposed to live painlessly and unconsciously in the world. I have a much different view. 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 this, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.
Marilynne Robinson isn’t saying anything very new, but over the course of the interview, she gives the impresion that she has reflected a little more intensely than most of us.
In a word, she’s not sounding too glib.
When asked about how she negotiates the conflict between her values and how other people choose to live, she straighforwardly liberal, but because we see this in the context of her background, her work… how she actually spends her time, it seems to me that it serves as a striking reminder of how to approach this kind of thing:
INTERVIEWER
Does your faith ever conflict with your “regular life”?ROBINSON
When I’m teaching, sometimes issues come up. I might read a scene in a student’s story that seems—by my standards—pornographic. I don’t believe in exploiting or treating with disrespect even an imagined person. But at the same time, I realize that I can’t universalize my standards. In instances like that, I feel I have to hold my religious reaction at bay. It is important to let people live out their experience of the world without censorious interference, except in very extreme cases.
