Gilead

I have found that good books can be broken down into two basic categories. Some, upon finishing, give the reader a sense of accomplishment. You turn the last page and feel a sort of quiet satisfaction. Others leave the reader wanting to turn back to the beginning and start all over again. You reach the end and suddenly you have a void inside, as though without this unfinished book in your hands, you are somehow incomplete. A few very great books paradoxically manage to do both. 

Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, is one of those few. I won my copy as an award back in my senior year of high school, and it's been sitting on my bookshelf ever since. Actually, that's a lie. I read the first 50 pages or so on my way back to Wheaton last August, and it spent the rest of the school year in the door of my car. I finally decided to finish it, more to ease my conscience than anything. I guess I felt like the poor book deserved it after everything I'd put it through. 

You might be wondering at this point what me reading a book has to do with the Tetons, and if you know me well enough to be familiar with my occasional, seemingly endless goings-on about the wonders of literature, you might be thinking this is one of those posts you have no interest in finishing. I have a point, I promise, and it isn't just to tell you you should go read Gilead. Although you should. 

"There are two occasions when the sacred beauty of Creation becomes dazzlingly apparent," writes Robinson's protagonist, Reverend John Ames, "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." I'm not sure I've ever read anything that so aptly encapsulates my experience with nature, up to and including this summer in the park. 

I think the reason we humans find nature so damn incredible is that it has been around so much longer than we have. My roommate and I drove up to Yellowstone on our day off, and we saw geysers and mud pots literally spewing out the insides of the earth. We saw a canyon cut over hundreds of thousands of years by what is now a swiftly rushing river. We saw mountains that have existed long before we were born, and that will go on existing long after we're dead. We wondered about the first people to ever lay eyes on these things, and beneath the wonder was a deeper understanding that even those early discoverers were merely walking in on something almost too timeless to imagine. Reflecting on all this, I very much feel my "mortal insufficiency to the world." 

But we also saw whole forests consumed by fire, leaving only the skeletons of trees to attest to their former greatness. We saw hillsides slowly but steadily eroded by storms, and that will one day be reduced to little besides sand and dust. We saw the increasingly thin layer of earth over thermal pockets that threaten to blow America's first national park sky-high. We wondered about how different the world would be. The fragility of it all was unsettling, shocking even. I was reminded of W.B. Yeats's "The Second Coming," when he writes, "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold." It's a very biblical idea, really. "For the present form of this world is passing away" (1 Corinthians 7:31).  Looking at it in this light, I feel "the world's mortal insufficiency" to me. 

If there is one theme that Gilead affirms more than any other, it is that life is precious. It is precious for its brevity. It is precious for its permanence. In one sense, the world will outlive us all. But in another, it is just a blink in the space of eternity. "The world is passing away along with its desires," writes John, "but whoever does the will of God abides forever" (1 John 2:17). There will come a time when we, as did the beloved disciple, will see a new heaven and a new earth. 

Though I was never able to find such eloquent words to describe them, I'd pondered these things before I read Gilead. I had even written about them before. But I'd never come to a conclusion quite as beautiful and, I believe, as true as Ames's:

"I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can’t believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets."


There, I hope I've made my point. By which I mean I hope I've made Robinson's point. Now go read Gilead.