"How did you end up here, Marilynne? What happened? Was it libraries?"
In 2015, President Obama sought out the novelist Marilynne Robinson, the author of the acclaimed Gilead trilogy, for a wide-ranging conversation. They spoke with the ease and deft mutual flattery of friends, touching on democracy and education, their Midwestern roots and love of literature. Obama's question lay at the crux of their discussion.
Is there any way to imagine Carrot Top even considering books???
Here's the quote that made me stop.
As a child, her teachers told her, "You have to live with your mind your whole life"; they taught her the value of building it, making it worthy. It was, she has said, the most important lesson she ever received.
Since at least high school, I've always answered various existential questions with, "you live between your ears". A point of view that doesn't drive one to keep up with the Joneses, naturally. All these years later, it's more than a tad comforting to find it in print.
An ironic way to close the piece
"Slander" is the story of Robinson's strained relationship with her mother. "With a little difficulty we finally reached an accommodation, an adult friendship," she writes. "Then she started watching Fox News." Her mother and her fellow retirees began to share "salacious dread over coffee cake," fretting over the rumored "war against Christmas." "My mother lived out the end of her fortunate life in a state of bitterness and panic, never having had the slightest brush with any experience that would confirm her in these emotions, except, of course, Fox News," Robinson writes. The essay brings all the abstractions home, makes real and painful the cost of ceding an independence of mind.
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