Gilead

Last night I finished reading "Gilead" by Marilynne Robinson. Another great great book... recommended by my dear friend Susan who shares my passion for fiction literature, amongst so many other things.

It's about a dying minister who writes a long letter to his young son. It touches upon the entire emotional spectrum of the human condition. It's very introspective; most of it's written as a monologue but it has colorful stories inter-woven seamlessly, such that you're never bored. I admit it's a little slow in the middle part but it picks up again and ends in such a peaceful way that it makes dying look more graceful than I've ever thought it could be. And it is beautifully written.

It won the Pulitzer Prize. Here are some of my favorite excerpts:

"Now, I may have been more than half asleep at that point, but a thought arose that abides with me. I wished I could sit at the feet of that eternal soul and learn. He did then seem to me the angel of himself, brooding over the mysteries his mortal life describes, the deep things of man. And of course that is exactly what he is. "For who among men knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of the man, which is in him?" In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate juridprudence. 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. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us."

"It is almost as if I felt his hand on my hand. Well, I can imagine him beyond the world, looking back at me with an amazement of realization- "This is why we have lived this life!" There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient."

"There are two occasions when the sacred beauty of Creation becomes dazzlingly apparent, and they occur together. One is when we feel our mortal insufficiency to the world, and the other is when we feel the world's mortal insufficiency to us. Augustine says the Lord loves each of us as an only child, and that has to be true. "He will wipe the tears from all faces." It takes nothing from the loveliness of the verse to say that is exactly what will be required.

Next on my reading list is "Chronicle of a Blood Merchant" by Yu Hua, also recommended by Susan.