and the hours after that

“Imagine this: some morning we awake to the cultural consensus that a family, however else defined, is a sort of compact of mutual loyalty, organized around the hope of giving rich, human meaning to the lives of its members. Toward this end they do what people do—play with their babies, comfort their sick, keep their holidays, commemorate their occasions, sing songs, tell jokes, fight and reconcile, teach and learn what they know about what is right and wrong, about what is beautiful and what is to be valued. They enjoy each other and make themselves enjoyable. They are kind and receive kindness, they are generous and are sustained and enriched by others’ generosity. The antidote to fear, distrust, self-interest is always loyalty. The balm for failure or weakness, or even for disloyalty, is always loyalty.

This is utopian. And yet. Certainly it describes something of which many of us feel deprived. We have reasoned our way to uniformly conditional relationships. This is at the very center of the crisis of the family, since the word means, if it means anything, that certain people exist on special terms with each other, which terms are more or less unconditional. We have instead decided to respect our parents, maybe, if they meet our stringent standards of deserving. Just so do our children respect us, maybe.

Siblings founder, spouses age. We founder. We age. That is when loyalty should matter. But invoking it now is about as potent a gesture as flashing a fat roll of rubles. I think this may contribute enormously to the sadness so many of us feel at the heart of contemporary society. ‘Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds,’ in the words of the sonnet, which I can only interpret to mean, love is loyalty. I would suggest that in its absence, all attempts to prop the family economically or morally or through education or otherwise will fail. The real issue is, will people shelter and nourish and humanize one another? This is creative work, requiring discipline and imagination. No one can be scolded or fined into doing it, nor does it occur spontaneously in the demographically traditional family.”

— Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (via discourseoflove)

“[W]ill people shelter and nourish and humanize one another? This is creative work, requiring discipline and imagination.”

— Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought

28 today. (:

i have resolved this year to learn to take things more lightly, and to practise this levity by putting myself in the way of the gift of self-forgetfulness.

“Oh Lord, I was never a quick scholar but sulked and hunched over my books past the hour and the bell; grant me, in your mercy, a little more time” (Mary Oliver, Thirst).

“Glory sat down on the porch steps. She thought, If Jack had been here, he’d have felt that terrible shock of joy—no, worse than joy, peace—that floods in like blood pushing into a limb that has been starved of it, like wild rescue, painful and wonderful and humbling—humiliating as she remembered it, because she had been so helpless against it.”

— Marilynne Robinson, Home

“She went to the porch to watch him walk away down the road. He was too thin and his clothes were weary, weary. There was nothing of youth about him, only the transient vigor of a man acting on a decision he refused to reconsider or regret. No, there might have been some remnant of the old aplomb. Who would bother to be kind to him? A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and as one from whom men hide their face. Ah, Jack.”

— Marilynne Robinson, Home

“It seemed to her there was a peacefulness about him that came with resignation, with the extinction of that last hope, like a perfect humility undistracted by the possible, the unrealized, the yet to be determined.”

— Marilynne Robinson, Home

“There are very few comforts to be had from half-confiding… .”

— Marilynne Robinson, Home

“Glory went to look in on her father. He lay on his right side, his face composed, intent on sleep. His hair had been brushed into a soft white cloud, like harmless aspiration, like a mist given off by the endless work of dreaming.”

— Marilynne Robinson, Home

“She said, ‘This is a nightmare I’ve had a hundred times. The one where all the rest of you go off and begin your lives and I am left in an empty house full of ridiculous furniture and unreadable books, waiting for someone to notice I’m missing and come back for me. And nobody does.’

He laughed. ‘Poor Pigtails.’ Then he said, ‘When I have that dream, I’m hiding in the barn hoping someone will find me, and nobody does.’”

— Marilynne Robinson, Home

“You see something beautiful in a child, and you almost live for it, you feel as though you would die for it, but it isn’t yours to keep or to protect.”

— Reverend Robert Boughton in Home by Marilynne Robinson

“He said, ‘Reverend Miles, Della’s father and my biographer, told me I was nothing but trouble. I felt the truth of that. I really am nothing.’ He looked at her. ‘Nothing, with a body. I create a kind of displacement around myself as I pass through the world, which can fairly be called trouble. This is a mystery, I believe.’ He said, ‘It’s why I keep to myself. When I can. Ah. And now the tears.’

‘Don’t you think everybody feels that way sometimes, though? I certainly have. While you had Della you didn’t feel that way. If you weren’t alone so much, I mean, Papa’s right about that. If you’d just let us help you.’”

— Marilynne Robinson, Home

“You can hate thoughts. That’s interesting. I hate most of my thoughts.”

— Jack Boughton in Home by Marilynne Robinson