MARILYNNE ROBINSON: WHY WRITING IS LIKE PRAYING

When it is published in November, Gilead will be Marilynne Robinson's first novel since her Housekeeping was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1981. The new novel, about a Civil War-era Idaho preacher reflecting on his father's pacifism and grandfather's abolitionism, was excerpted earlier this month in the New Yorker and accompanied by an online interview. In the interview, Robinson, professor of creative writing at the acclaimed University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, talked about writing and Calvinism.

"A thing I have always loved about writing, or even simply intending to write, is that it makes attentiveness a habit of mind," Robinson says, by way of explaining the time between her two novels. "I do ponder things over long stretches of time, not having any specific intention beyond the hope of having some grasp of them." When the New Yorker notes that one of her characters says, "Writing has always felt to me like praying," Robinson replies, "I do feel that writing is like praying. I think that in both, if they are to be authentic, grace and truth must discipline thought."

The New Yorker also asks Robinson about the legacy of John Calvin, whom Robinson examined in her essay collection The Death of Adam, and who, the interviewer says, "is clearly a presence in the [new] novel." Robinson says Calvin is someone whose influence on Western thought is often acknowledged but "whose writing no one seems to read—not even the scholars and the historians." (I heard Robinson give a paper at Calvin College, so we both know there are exceptions.) She suggests we must resist the impulse to "put his thought to crude uses," but asserts that Calvin's consideration of metaphysics "had a huge impact on the development of the modern West," that the association of his participation in the Reformation with rebellion "was surely a factor" in the French and American revolutions, and that "his belief … that the sacred has no boundaries" survives as secularism.

The interview concludes with an inquiry about Robinson's service as deacon in a Congregationalist church. She notes that Congregationalism "is one of the most democratic branches of Calvinist tradition," in which deacons and pastors are elected, and lay members are sometimes called to speak in place of the pastor. When she has done so, Robinson reflects, "It is a deeply instructive experience, a very interesting way to think. And the situation is interesting—to stand in a pulpit does focus the mind, or it should."

PLACES & CULTURE

From the New York Times :*

• It may seem odd that Mozambican businesses are doing a brisk trade in three-legged aluminum pots, ferried by the truckload to buyers in nearby Swaziland and South Africa … Mozambique's only aluminum smelter sells its entire production abroad [and] Mozambique is not importing any aluminum, either. The likely [explanation] lies just outside the tiny settlement of 7 September, along the rutted dirt road that links this destitute collection of stone-walled shacks with the outside world. Here, deep in a towering thicket of bush, thieves cut a brace of four power lines from their creosoted wooden poles in February and carted away more than 35 miles of aluminum cable before anyone noticed. … Throughout southern Africa, cable theft is ubiquitous, a sort of third-world analog to first-world thefts of car radios. In [one] district, where power lines stretch over 46,000 miles of poles, the direct losses to the utility this year amount to $250,000, a huge sum here.
• THE New York City Department of Transportation and the Department of Design and Construction will select a new standard design this fall for the city's more than 320,000 streetlights. The last citywide standard was Donald Deskey's "cobra head" of 1958, and the history of streetlight design suggests that the logic of uniformity poses problems in a city of widely varying streetscapes. … The city installs about 4,400 streetlights a year, and has no plans for replacing a large number. So there is no guarantee that the selected design will be used. Indeed, the main effect of the competition for a new streetlight may be the attention it brings to the problems posed by the growing welter of street furniture, the surviving fragments of earlier ages, and the relative values of uniformity—and variety—on the city's streets.

WEEKLY DIGEST

• Sigmund Freud is remembered as the founder of psychoanalysis, but since many of his theories have been discredited, his influence is ambiguous. But last week's PBS special, The Question of God, is a reminder that Freud's rejection of the spiritual and divine helped lay the groundwork for the kind of humanistic reduction that has pervaded the social sciences ever since. The series pits the views of Freud against his foil: C.S. Lewis, who seemed to follow Freud's work. "I was astonished at how Freud would raise a question and then Lewis would attempt to answer it," Armand Nicholi—whose course at Harvard Medical School inspired the PBS series—told columnist Terry Mattingly. "Nicholi presents Freud as a spokesman for the 'secular worldview' that denies the existence of any truth or reality outside the material world. Lewis is the champion of a 'spiritual worldview' which accepts the reality of God," Mattingly says. In the New York Times , Peter Steinfels questions whether Lewis was as influential as Freud, but summarizes one of the scholars interviewed in the series: "Despite much talk of postmodernism, for many people the major arguments about belief in God's existence are the same today as they were a century ago, arguments pitting faith and religious experience against the philosophical naturalism that accepts only claims passing tests of scientific verification." Mattingly/Steinfels*
• There were hints of Freud's humanism in a Slate piece last week on secular life ceremonies. "The rituals are the work of a growing number of "secular officiants" who create religion-free life-cycle rituals … [that] attract those who have abandoned traditional religion—atheists and the 'spiritual but not religious' alike," Slate wrote. Secular wedding ceremonies might include "'calling the directions,' a commonly adopted Wiccan (neo-pagan) and Native American custom in which North, South, East, and West are summoned to bless and aid those involved in the ceremony." As Slate observes, the problem is that "pulling rituals from various traditions and performing them out of context risks distancing them from the realities of participants' spiritual lives. They may evoke the intended visceral reactions—pushing the right emotional buttons and giving the proceedings the solemnity they deserve—while leaving little below the surface." Article
• Working his dissertation on the history of suicide in America, Harvard graduate student Richard J. Bell has revised his central questions, he says in the journal Common-place. He began by asking how many early Americans killed themselves, how and why. Because of the paucity of data for these questions, Bell is now asking "how Americans in the early republic responded to suicide or the threat of it and what they understood that threat to be." Suicide was against the law in early America and often covered up, even with the cooperation of the news media. But accounts of slave suicides are so common and compelling that "I have recently moved suicide and slavery to the center of my dissertation project." Early American reformers compared dueling, gambling and drinking to suicide to advance their cause, and Benjamin Rush of the Humane Society of Philadelphia, in the early 1800s, took measures to prevent suicide, including signs on bridges that read, "Do Not Despair." Essay

Related:
Volunteer watches for suicide on the Yangtze River Bridge,* from the New York Times
Is suicide illegal? from the Chicago Reader
Earlier:
Outbreak of suicides among youth in Japan, earlier in this blog
Suicide and the silence of Scripture, from Christianity Today
Also from Common-place: Counterfeit money in American history

•Archaeologists have always looked at the remains of ancient cats—and other animals revered in ancient Egypt and placed in the pyramids—and assumed they were an afterthought. "The animal might have had little more than a quick dip in a resin bath, say, and a few turns of linen wrapping before being consigned to a catacomb or sarcophagus as an offering to the gods or as burial companions for rulers," the New York Times says. But new research published in Nature suggests Egyptian cats may have gotten royal treatment in death. Chemical analysis of animal mummies at the University of Bristol in England shows traces of the same chemical mixtures that were applied to humans. "It's a quite nice list of sophisticated chemicals"—and expensive ones—the researchers told the Times. Article*

Earlier:
Were the pyramid builders as poor as we thought? (Sixth item)

•Miscellaneous: Keeping an eye on Iran's nuclear program, from the London Guardian—David Remnick on Chechnya in the New Yorker - Extraterrestrial life will need a 'Goldilocks' planet,* not too hot or cold, from the Times - Was Rembrandt 'stereoblind'?* from the Times - A convention of Christian romance writers, from the Times - State legislature candidate would be first Saudi-born U.S. officeholder, from the Christian Science Monitor - Tracking California condors via satellite, from Smithsonian - A day in the life of an Australian Supreme Court justice, from the Melbourne Age

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Nathan Bierma is editorial assistant at Books & Culture. He writes the weekly "On Language" column for the Chicago Tribune.