Searching for Life and Light: Dillard and Robinson

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Searching for Life and Light: Dillard and Robinson

In this semester’s “Life and Light” column, I have explored authors who have, in some form, responded to the literary and cultural modernism of roughly the past century. Rather than asking the tradition’s questions — What is God? What is Man? And what has each to do with the other? —the modern finds himself severed from the past, lacking the roots of a secure religious or cultural context. Yet, several 20th-century authors have attempted to address what they see to be problems with the modern attitude. Recall T.S. Eliot’s language of fragmentation and Percy’s of malaise and the way that both hinted that some solution lies in a recovery of religious vision. Now, the time has come to turn our attention to two other authors: Annie Dillard and Marilynne Robinson.

While many may be familiar with Dillard’s “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” (1974), fewer may be aware of a later work of hers, “Holy the Firm” (1977), which deals with the problem of unexplained suffering in the world and exposes the reader to how Dillard is making sense of a particular tragedy she encounters. The context in which Robinson sets her story, “Gilead,” is a little further removed: rural Kansas in the late 1800s. Yet, despite the slight antiquity of Robinson’s setting, the spirit of her writing can speak to and act as a balm for the spiritually and morally fatigued individual who picks up “Gilead” off the shelf today.

“Holy the Firm” takes the form of a 76-page journal-like series of reflections which Dillard writes out during a three day period in a water-front cottage on an island in Washington state’s Pudget Sound in 1975. Dillard sees a firestorm of spiritual metaphors in the natural world, like a moth that flies into her candle flame one evening, becomes consumed by the fire, then acts as a wick that provides illumination by which she can read Rimbaud’s verse. The keenly sensitive central concern of Dillard’s reflections is: If there is a loving and powerful God, why is there so much suffering? Suddenly, Dillard’s reverie of the natural world collides with tragedy. A small plane crashes into the nearby woods and explodes, melting the skin off the face of its passenger, a seven-year-old girl named Julie Norwich, with whom Dillard had been apple-picking the day before. The horrifically-disfigured girl faces a lifetime of pain and blindness, in response to which Dillard writes, “Her face is slaughtered now… Can you scream without lips?” She asks, “Do we really need more victims to remind us that we’re all victims? …Do we need little flame-faced children to remind us of what God can — and will — do?”

While Dillard seems not to reach an overly-satisfying answer to these questions that brings peace to herself or her readers, she does seem to gingerly (but purposefully) re-envision some forms of suffering as enigmas which provides fodder for artistic illumination of our experience, like the moth, consumed in flame. Sometimes mysterious light can shine through tragedy and gives us an idea that something is going on. She writes, “There is only the world lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is lit, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it? But the world without light is wasteland and chaos, and life without sacrifice is an abomination.” Perhaps individual objects of suffering are something like art that lights the Kingdom of God for people to see?

I believe that Dillard suggests that God must have self-imposed limits on his own power, and that she would strongly agree with Flannery O’Connor’s sentiment that “evil is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be endured.” Dillard’s “Holy The Firm” does respect the problems of evil and suffering as mysteries, and I recommend the book strongly for anyone who has the strength of will to entertain the notion of God’s existence and the discernment to see the difficulty in such a notion.

Marilynne Robinson’s “Gilead” provides a drastically different experience for the reader. Rather than a condensed exposition of the kind of heart-wrenching events that can turn our lives upside down, Robinson’s protagonist, Reverend John Ames, shares a vision of human experience that is permeated by grace. The novel takes the form of a letter that Ames writes, as he is dying, for his seven-year-old son to read when he is grown. His reflections are an amalgamation of memories and ponderings that range from love, grace, existence, blessing and light to wonder, memory, mortality, and darkness. Ames processes through his upcoming death, his years past of deep loneliness, and his relationship with a wayward god-son-of-sorts whom he struggles to forgive. As the letter progresses, Ames moves towards a position of empathy and love. In reading “Gilead,” I find that he is able to adopt a redemptive, grace-filled vision in large part through his sense of wonder at the beauty of the world. He writes, for example, “I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again.” Ames’ vision of the world is foundationally colored by his faith, which allows him, for instance, to conceive of love as “the eternal breaking in on the temporal” and enables him to appreciate a thing as simply beautiful as water — tangible evidence of God’s blessing on the world. Ames speaks of a “silent and invisible life” that emanates from a garden after rainfall. Ames sees this invisible life in others’ laughter, romantic love, soft moonlight, and old friends. For him (and I presume, for Robinson), these very-earthly delights are made holy by the presence of the Divine in them—author and protagonist subscribe to a richly sacramental physical world.

As a reader, my question is this: Can the suffering of Dillard’s book and the grace of Robinson’s be compatible or is an attempt to reconcile the two impossible? Are we left with fragments — or something more?