>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington DC. [silence] >> TED WIDMER: Welcome to
the Library of Congress. I'm Ted Widmer. I'm the Director of the John W.
Kluge Center here at the Library. And I want to thank Rob Casper
of the Poetry & Literature Center for all he did to include
our center, including all of our
scholars who are here tonight. I want to take this
opportunity to invite you to silence your cellphones and
any other electronic devices. And also, after the panel
discussion, we will have a Q&A that will be live streamed. If you choose to ask a
question, which I hope you will, you give permission to the
Library to broadcast yourself. So, choose your question carefully. I have a special reason
for rejoicing this evening. I was in a huge audience on the
Main Green of Brown University, my former employer, and the
alma mater of Marilynne Robinson when she was given an
honorary degree in 2012. I was so far across that Green
that I couldn't even see her. I'm grateful to the Library
for hosting this event because I will have
a much better seat. While in Rhode Island, I was the
Director for Rare Books Library that specialized in early
American history, 16th, 17th, and 18th Centuries. We all felt a special debt
of gratitude to Marilynne for breathing new life into the
old spiritual questions that had so deeply moved these very early
Americans all too often consigned to the so-called dust bin of history
in our small part of the country. Her wonderful books have always
felt like letters from a friend. But, she's also, of course,
a great national figure in our Republic of Letters. That's why tonight's
award means so much. We have some extraordinarily
literate people here to assess her impact. I will conclude these introductory
remarks by simply saying welcome and thank you for being here. Now, it's my pleasure to
introduce the Director of National and International Outreach here at
the Library, the Former Director of the Kluge Center,
and the Former President of Bryn Mawr College,
Dr. Jane McAuliffe. Thank you. [applause] >> JANE MCAULIFFE: Thank you, Ted. It's great to see all of you here
tonight to help us honor the work of Marilynne Robinson,
winner of the 2016 Library of Congress Prize for
American Fiction. Welcome to the Library. I also want to welcome
our online audience, especially the Congressional United
Church of Christ in Iowa City where Marilynne served as
a deacon for many years. The prize in American Fiction
stands as one of the highest honors that the Library bestows on
a living American writer. It seeks to commend strong,
unique, enduring voices that have told us something new
about the American experience. For those of you who weren't at the National Book Festival
last September when the Librarian of Congress presented Marilynne
with her prize, I can tell you that our winner had a lively
and insightful conversation about her work with the festival's
Literary Director, Marie Arana. No single conversation,
however, could capture the power of Marilynne's work,
which has received many of the country's other top honors,
including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics
Circle Award, and the National Humanities Medal,
which brings us to tonight's event, a conversation we're calling
Fiction, Faith, and the Imagination. We have an amazing
panel here with us, including two Pulitzer
Prize winners, Geraldine Brooks and Paul Harding. Paul studied under Marilynne at
the famed Iowa Writers' Workshop. We're also joined by the renowned
American physicist, Alan Lightman. And Dr. Steven Knapp, President of George Washington University
will moderate the discussion. Of course, Marilynne is here
with us tonight as well. One of Marilynne's great admirers
is former President Barack Obama. He couldn't be with us tonight, but he sent a special
surprise message for Marilynne. Please let me read
President Obama's words. "Like most Americans, I first met
Marilynne Robinson on the pages of one of her extraordinary novels. For me, it was Gilead, a book I'd
picked up as I was barnstorming across Iowa during my first
campaign for president. In it, I met folks who were
decent and goodhearted, full of their own complexities
and struggles. I was absorbed into a story that
grapples equally with the blossoms and the thorns in our relationships
with each other, with ourselves, with our Creator, and still
manages to achieve a level of grace that we are all striving
for in our own lives. That's what Marilynne
does so brilliantly. She not only draws us into
the texture of the people and the community she creates,
but wraps us all together in something larger, a patchwork of
characters, and readers, and author, of our struggles and our
delights, of our faith, our doubts, our redemption. And in so doing, she
elevates our understanding of what it means to be fully human. That's what the highest
of art can achieve. It's what the greatest library
in the world should celebrate. It's what Marilynne Robinson seems to radiate every time
she sits down to write. So, I want to once again
congratulate my friend, Marilynne, on her distinguished award. And I want to thank you all
for gathering together tonight for something that for Marilynne
might be an even greater award, a thoughtful, lively
conversation on some of the topics dear
to all our hearts. Have a great night everyone." On that lovely note
from President Obama, please let me turn this evening
over to President Steven Knapp. [applause] >> STEVEN KNAPP: Thank
you very much, Jane. It's a pleasure to welcome you. I'd also like to thank the
Center for Poetry and Literature, and the Kluge Center, and
their directors, Robert Casper and Ted Widmer respectively
for hosting this event here at the Library of Congress. I want to say at the outset how
honored I am to be moderating such a distinguished panel,
as you've already heard. I do think that President
Obama has just done a great job of opening the panel discussion, but I'm going to still say a few
things before I start posing some questions to our panelists. Our topic is the relationship
between faith and imagination. I'm really not aware of the more
compelling instance of that relation in modern fiction in the way
Marilynne Robinson reimagines the Christian, and more specifically the
Calvinist conception of divine grace in the three novels
of her Gilead trilogy. Those are Gilead, Home,
and Lila, of course. She does so impart the remarkable
elaboration and transposition of the most famous imaginative
depiction of divine grace in the New Testament,
the so-called Parable of the Prodigal Son
in the Gospel of Luke. A man has two sons,
and the younger asked for his inheritance in advance. The father grants the request. The son goes off, squanders his
patrimony through dissonant living, and returns home impoverished
and disgraced. His father not only forgives him, but amazingly throws
a party in his honor. The older son, who was always
been dutiful and obedient, objects to this special treatment, but the father gently
rebukes him explaining that, "This brother of yours was
dead, and has come to life. He was lost and has been found." I think I could show how echoes of this parable pervade
Robinson's trilogy, but it's most obviously evoked
by the middle novel, Home. Home begins with a child's return
to a father, only this child, named Glory, is a younger
sister, not a brother. Her only sin was misplaced trust
in a fiancé who jilted her. She isn't greeted by
any sort of party, and she quickly assumes the role of
the dutiful and obedient caregiver of her ailing father, Presbyterian
Minister Robert Boughton. The real prodigal son,
her elder brother, Jack, soon comes home as well. Much of the novel focuses
on his difficult and never-quite-finished
reconciliation with their father. Jack, who remains the
father's favorite, despite his delinquent childhood
and his many years of absence from the family home, eventually
leaves before disclosing the act that would have been his
greatest sin in his father's eyes, but is also the source of
his own moral redemption, his marriage to an
African American woman and his fathering of
a mixed-race son. Jack's wife, Della, and son, Robert, show up at the family home
just after Jack has left. So, Glory, not the father,
finds out the truth. The novel ends with
Glory prophesying in her own imagination the
day when Jack's son, Robert, will return to the homestead truly
answering his father's prayers in a way that Jack never quite
answered his own father's prayers. And that, Glory sees
as the long delayed but infinitely merciful
expression of God's grace. Now that only scratches the surface
of Robinson's treatment of the theme of grace, explicitly analyzed by
the terminally ill protagonist and narrator of the first
novel, Reverend John Ames, and reworked in an entirely
new way through the thoughts of his religiously uneducated and
much younger wife, Lila, protagonist and namesake of the third novel. What gives Robinson's exploration
of grace, its imaginative depth, is not just the variety of personal
angles from which she approaches it, but the subtle way in which she
connects those personal stories with the salient movements and
events that inform or surround them. Abolitionism, the Civil War, the
Dust Bowl, the Great Depression, the beginning of the
Civil Rights Movement. Throughout the trilogy,
these elements of history sometimes lie dormant,
sometimes hunt the present, sometimes break violently through
the surface of her narrative. I'd like to start our discussion. I think I'll start with
you, Geraldine Brooks. Again, our topic is fiction,
faith, and imagination. As I just suggested, one
of the fascinating elements of Robinson's fiction is the way she
weaves together religious concerns with a rich, historical context. What's your sense of the way
that works in her novels? >> GERALDINE BROOKS: Marilynne
Robinson's novels temporarily are situated in the near past. It's not traditionally what would
be described as historical fiction. It's in what I'd like to think of
as Henry James' designated safe zone because James famously once
observed that any attempt to write about a period more than 50 years
removed from one's zone is worthless and should not be attempted because the old consciousness
will be too elusive to us. Actually, if you think about it,
if you're a novelist in the middle of the journey of your life, that
50-year window added to the 50 years of your own experience gives
you an entire century in which to apply your trade, which is a
not ungenerous period of time. And I think in the case of
Marilynne's luminous novels, this is very important because I
can't imagine Gilead set after 1960. I think it is much better set in
the slightly more distant past. Perhaps, if you wanted to
look for a dividing line, it would be before you could
possibly have a Time Magazine cover that said, "Is God Dead?" I think you're in a time period
where the corrosive influence of materialistic skepticism has not
yet eroded the social fabric of, at least, the English-speaking
world to the extent that happened perhaps
after the '60s. It reminds me of a wonderful essay
by James Wood in his collection of The Broken Estate where he talks
about how the novel itself was, in a way, corrosive to faith
because the novel is an as-if form. You're creating as if, but
you're not creating certainty. And he talks about the very few
brilliant writers who are able to retain a mysticism and a
religious element in their fiction with the true belief
in fiction itself and the prophecies of fiction. He singles out Virginia Woolf and
talks about the gentle dalliance that she has between
religion and mysticism. And I think that Marilynne Robinson
is not a gentle dalliance at all. It is a passionate,
sweaty, congress. I think it works very beautifully
because she sees the mystical and religious in the ordinary. It doesn't have to be a
virgin birth to be wonderful because any birth is a miracle
as Ames' love for his young son, so beautifully evoked, demonstrates. Then, I think of that wonderful
passage that Ames reflects that light is constant and
we just turn over in it. Every day is one day. Once you have that
thought, then who needs to argue whether the world
was created in six days? It becomes a magnificent
irrelevancy. You can have the faith without. >> STEVEN KNAPP: Thanks very much. Thank you. Alan, you're, among
other things, a novelist. You have many roles, but you're
a novelist who's written Mr. g, a speculative novel about
the ultimate reality. You're also a scientist. As we know, some prominent
scientists of recent years, and this relates to the
corrosive materialism that Geraldine just mentioned,
you've noticed how in recent years, science has been highly
critical of religion, and tend to affirm
evidence-based reasoning and contrast to reliance on faith. Defenders of religion
often respond by arguing that science itself relies
on its own kind of faith. What's your take on that? Does faith play a role in science? If so, what kind of faith? How do you think about
that in relation to your imaginative engagement
with both religion and science? >> ALAN LIGHTMAN: I think,
for me, faith is belief in something that you can't prove. The folklore is that everything
that science believes, it can prove, and nothing that religion
believes, it can prove. I think that science and religion
have very different methods of arriving at their beliefs, but
I think there is a faith in both. The faith in science is something
that's very, very fundamental, the kind of faith that
scientists have. It's something that one might call
the central doctrine of science. And the central doctrine
of science is that the universe is
lawful and logical. It's a doctrine that we scientists,
learn as graduate students. We may not learn it
consciously but it's in the air. It's a belief that just
osmosis into the skin. It's a fundamental working
belief that scientists have. It's a belief that can't be proved. It has to be taken on faith because
no matter how much science knows and no matter how successful our
theories are, they're incomplete. There are things that we don't know,
which Marilynne has talked about, things that science doesn't know. We can't be certain that all parts of the universe are
lawful and logical. We don't know for sure whether some
new phenomena discovered tomorrow will be lawful and logical. We can't be certain. The belief in the central
doctrine that everything in the physical universe is lawful
and logical, that is something that has to be taken on faith. >> STEVEN KNAPP: You've also
expressed the interest of times in relation between physical and
nonphysical conceptions of reality. Can you say maybe a little bit
more about that as a physicist, and how you think about
the nonphysical? >> ALAN LIGHTMAN: Marilynne
has written wonderfully about science and religion. She suggests in her writing
that we make too much a deal out of the difference between
the physical and nonphysical, but we make too big a distinction. What she says, and please
correct me, Marilynne, if I'm getting you wrong. She says that because
the knowledge of science about the physical
universe is incomplete that we can't confidently
make an opposition between the physical universe
and a nonphysical universe because we don't really fully
understand the physical universe. I agree with part of
that, but not all of it. I do agree that the
knowledge of science about the physical
universe is incomplete. For me, as both a scientist, and
a humanist, and if I can say, a spiritual person, I think the
distinction between the physical and the nonphysical
universe is very important. I think that there are
experiences that we have and probably everybody
here has had them, you could call them
transcendent experiences, that science will never be able
to explain even in principle, will never be able
to fully comprehend. You can hook a hundred billion
electrodes to my neurons and measure every electrical
output of each neuron, but that will not explain the
experience that I have in looking at the stars at night or the feeling that there's something
larger than myself. That, for me, is part of
the nonphysical universe. If we believe in God, if God
exists, every religion that I know of has a conception of God in which
God does not live in time and space. God is not subject
to laws and rules. And so God would also be a part of what I would call the
nonphysical universe. On the other hand, I am a strong
subscriber to the central doctrine of science having said all of that. And I do think that there
is a vast range of phenomena that science does understand, that
science can explain, that is subject to the laws that we understand, and
I call that the physical universe. So, I need to have a distinction
between those two universes to live a life both as a
scientist and as a humanist. >> STEVEN KNAPP: Do you
want to say a little bit about how your novelistic
interest fit into that? >> ALAN LIGHTMAN: How? >> STEVEN KNAPP: How
your interest as a writer of fiction yourself are
related to that distinction? >> ALAN LIGHTMAN: Well
I, I wrote a book, my novel called Mr. g. That's a
lower case "G" standing for god. It's a book that tells
the story of creation from the point of view of God. God is the narrator of the book. God has an uncle and an aunt
who are always chastising him for not getting things right. The universe that God
creates is a lawful universe. God considers the possibility
of entering the universe, and intervening, and performing
miracles, which would be unlawful, and would violate the
central doctrine of science, but God chooses not to do that. For me, this was an important
exploration for me to think about how the physical and the
spiritual universes could exist in harmony with each other
without any contradiction. >> STEVEN KNAPP: We've
talked a little bit about how the imagination
engages the not-too-distant past. We've talked now about how the
imagination negotiates the path between the common physical and nonphysical dimensions
of our experience. I want to shift to a
slightly more personal take on Marilynne Robinson's
career, and that is to do, Paul, with her role as a teacher. In the courses that happened,
you've been a student of hers. I wonder if you could say
a little bit about what that experience was like, and
does the intersection of faith and imagination also play a role
in the classroom, in her classroom? >> PAUL HARDING: I can say
that it was a good experience to be Marilynne's student. Just to start anecdotally, I had the
experience of having been a drummer in a rock band for many years. The rock band broke up, and
came time for me to get a job. I was so teared to that
prospect, so I thought, "I'll just go to grad school." Like a lot of writers, people who
become writers, I was a reader. I thought of myself as a writer
long before I wrote anything. I just walked around saying,
"I'm the writer in the family." I, finally, had the opportunity
to take a fiction writing class at Skidmore College in Saratoga. Just by luck of lottery,
I signed up for a class, and Marilynne Robinson walked in. Within 10 minutes of her starting
to talk about the life of the mind, our spirituality, history, I knew
that that's the life I wanted for my own mind, and want
to try to emulate that. I was lucky enough to
be able to follow her to that Iowa Writers' Workshop
at the University of Iowa. I think the day I found out I
got into Iowa was the day I found out that she had won the Strauss
Living award and was not going to be in Iowa while I was a student there. I had to figure out
how to make my breaks. She taught a class
in the Old Testament at the Congregational
Church in Iowa City. I think that was the first time I
studied the Old Testament with her. I've used the analogy before
but being able to study with Marilynne is like the
difference between sitting in a seminar room and
studying Paradise Lost, and sitting in a seminar
room with John Milton. It really is that profound. She taught me fellowship. She taught me how to treat
other human beings as reverence, which as a skeptic
fresh from sophomore, my sophomore skepticism
class, I was not in the habit of granting other people reverence
or respect in a way that was like running into the best brick
wall you could ever run into. I think all of these things
aligned telescopically in the way that she teaches, the way that she
thinks, the way that she writes, the way that she models
the life of the mind, the intensity, and
the honesty of it. She often says that your job as a
fiction writer is to write sentences that are true, which is the
contradictory because of a lot of the anecdotal thing that fiction
writers get on stage, and they say, "I have to become a fiction writer
because I'm a pathological liar." Then, over the years, I had
never considered religion. I grew up innocent of religion,
I would say innocent just in a strict sense of I
did not go to church. My family was neither
antagonistic toward religion or sympathetic with it. A certain point though, admiring
Marilynne as much as I did, it occurred to me that if I
were to ask her what the source of her artistic and
intellectual sophistication was, she would say her religion. Being inclined to respect her,
I thought, "Maybe I better look into this theology
business and faith." I also wanted to be able to have
something to talk about with her when I cornered her for
coffee, which is another story. So, I read Calvin's Institutes. And I started reading Karl
Barth's Church Dogmatics. We started having these
wonderful conversations that haven't ended yet. I think the theologian, Karl Barth, says that we are all
ordained to fellowship. I think that's one of the things
that has really struck me deeply and has never stopped resonating. I'd say that the intersection of
her faith and the imagination, I don't know that she'd
make a distinction. Just in terms and she's written
about this, but I think she thinks of her faith, and I'm
paraphrasing, so it's not like, "I just think she might," but
I think she thinks of her faith as a given of experience,
one of the great given. It's "phenomenological"
to put in secular terms. It's a gift. She cites William James with that. She says she takes an
exalted view of experience. She never openly proselytizes
in class or anything but she embodies the
virtues of the best parts of her own faith and of grace. By embodying them, it
inspired her students. >> STEVEN KNAPP: Good, thank you. That's a terrific tribute. I do want to say that as a
sometimes scholar of Milton, you would not have enjoyed a seminar
with John Milton quite the same. >> PAUL HARDING: It shows
poorly a parodistic quality of mind, maybe not personal. >> STEVEN KNAPP: That's bad,
yeah, if you're talking to her. >> PAUL HARDING: Shakespeare maybe. >> STEVEN KNAPP: I'm really
struck by what you said about, and maybe she can comment
on this at some point, about Marilynne Robinson's
not really drawing as much of a distinction between
faith and panel ... We could start with anyone who's
interested in taking this up. How do you think about the
imagination as one might anticipate? I'm curious what each of
the panelist has to say about that question, and that
is how close the relation between faith and imagination? How do each of you
sort of experience that because one could
say that in these novels, one has an extraordinarily intimate
engagement with the consciousness of the characters she depicts. Sometimes, that line becomes a
little bit difficult to draw. I mentioned the prophetic
moment at the end of Home where Glory imagines decades in
the future when a fulfillment of this story of grace will occur. Who knows whether it
actually will or not. That, in a way, is
a gesture of faith. In another sense, it is
a moment of imagining. I just wondered if maybe
each of the distinctions and similarities overlap
inner penetration of faith and imagination? >> GERALDINE BROOKS: I actually
feel very sorry for people who don't have any
religious education. I've had two separate ones. Possibly, even three. I was raised Roman Catholic in a very traditional baroque
Irish style, educated by nuns. And I think that the great
gifts of that time were capacity for abstract thought because
when you tell a seven-year-old that there are three persons in
one God, you are really opening up the idea of abstract thought
in a very particular way. And the other thing I'm
grateful for is the sense of metaphor that you get. I remember Benediction, and the
Litany of Mary, and the long list of ways that you can evoke
Mary as the Lily of the Valley, the Star of the Sea,
the Mystic Rose. I think that religion opens
you up to imagination. In later life, I've
embraced Judaism, which some would say is a much
more hardheaded piece of business. I also studied Islam very closely
in my years a foreign correspondent. Living among the women of Islam who
had made a very different choice to my own, which was to embrace
an orthodox version of faith that I found very confounding. I wanted to explore
why they had done that. But, I love what Marilynne once
said when somebody asked her if she'd had an ecstatic
religious experience, and she said, "That would be wasted on me," because she finds the
ordinary so numinous. And I think that that is what a
religious imagination gives you is a sense of noticing the
divinity in the ordinary. That's why I like Jewish press
so much because most of it is about being grateful for
noticing the dew on the grass, the first sliver of the new moon,
blessing the bread, and the wine, and your children every
single Friday night. That is a good habit of
mind to get into, I think. >> STEVEN KNAPP: What else? Do you want to pick
that up at all, Alan? >> ALAN LIGHTMAN: I think of
faith as belief in the unseen. To me, that's very
close to the imagination because in the imagination, we
are creating things in our minds that may not be concrete, that
may not be visible; and yet, they are ideas that motivate us,
that provoke us, that stimulate us. And so that's a connection that
I see at a really low level between faith and imagination. >> PAUL HARDING: I think
the act of creating art, and the act of cultivating your
imagination, the discipline of observation, and the discipline
of being able to observe things as intensely and as closely
as possible, and render them on to the pages aesthetically,
to put aesthetic pressure on them in the case of writing
fiction is an act of devotion. It's an act of obedience. It's an act of prayer. With that beautiful kind of
commerce between, it's in your mind. There's this onto-epistemological
state where your mind is generating these
aesthetic productions and working with metaphors that are so bound. They build up. Then, they topple. You build them up again. But, then, you end up with this
book that goes out into the world. As a writer, you understand that
this book is going to interact with other people and their lives,
and it's going to have this ... Again, back to fellowship,
but also the act of faith. These works of art have to be made
in good faith because they're going to go out and affect
other people's lives. >> STEVEN KNAPP: It occurs
to me that one of the ways in which the interplay of
faith and imagination works in Marilynne Robinson's
fiction, in particular, has to do with the way
persons engage each other, and try to understand each
other, and that it's the mystery of other persons becomes
an occasion for. It's almost like you can only
gauge other people through an act of solitude, an act of
faith, and a measure. I'm thinking of the various
efforts that characters make to understand each other,
whether it's John Ames trying to understand his slightly mad
grandfather and the relation between his father
and his grandfather. Lila trying to understand this
new world, and feel her way into the alien world of
John Ames, and his theology, or everyone is trying to understand
Jack, and what makes him work, and he doesn't seem to quite
understand himself, and almost has to engage himself in the same way. There's this constant sense
of engagement with mystery when you're dealing with persons. It's not just the supernatural
realm. It's actually the everyday
interchange of human relations that becomes this occasion for faith and imaginative engagement
with others. There's another element to
this, which we haven't brought into that's been at the edges of
what we've been talking about. I think this is something,
Geraldine, you said you might have
an issue talking about it. We've been talking about pretty
ponderous and grand subjects here, but there's also an element of wit
and humor that I think you wanted to make sure you didn't ignore,
if you could maybe take us in that direction a little bit. >> GERALDINE BROOKS: Yeah. I think everybody is so odd by
the grandeur, and the achievement, and the penetration into
soul that Marilynne achieves, but they're very funny books. In places, extremely funny books. I think of some of the
characterizations in housekeeping where everybody is struggling
to understand each other. It's just a wonderful sense
of the essential unknowability of even the people that you're
closest to, and you love the most, and why did they do that? Since that just made me smile
and chuckle, the good women of Fingerbone coming to see about
the children with the best will in the world is so
deliciously invoked. Then, my other favorite scene is
in Gilead, the characterization of Ames' father and his
grandfather when they're very, very angry at each other. Every sentence ends with
Reverend, thrown as a javelin. Yeah, I think the wit is something that should not be either
overlooked or underestimated. >> STEVEN KNAPP: Does that also come through the classroom
would say, Paul? >> PAUL HARDING: Absolutely, yes. Just wicked isn't the right word
but pry, understated profound. Yes, yes. I'll just leave it there. >> STEVEN KNAPP: Another, I
talked about the thing of grace, but there's another biblical theme
that runs through these novels. It has to do with an
interest in outsiders. I think, Paul, you had mentioned an
interest in the biblical emphasis and social justice, and especially
as it's figured as the commitment to care for the stranger, the
widow, the orphan, and so on. Can you talk a little about it? I know you're interested in
that element of the fiction, if you could talk a little
bit about that perhaps. >> PAUL HARDING: I think it
begins with just the lives that she has taken the time
to devote her attention to. As you say that, I'm particularly
thinking about Lila in this case where she is poor, she is an orphan, she's Ruth weeping
in the alien corner. That's a line from the Keats poem. Just by the act of devoting and
lavishing that quality of attention on lives that would otherwise
go unremarked of a piece like the active obedience,
the act of faith, the act of your imagination
being a gesture of fellowship towards these lives
that would not be otherwise noted, and the kind of lives that get swept
into the corners by because all of the kings and the princes,
and the judges are up to no good. This is another thing about if
one thing makes the Lord angry, it's not taking care of
the widow and the stranger, and the hungry, and the orphan. >> STEVEN KNAPP: In the trilogy,
there's an absent version of this that nevertheless haunts
all the narratives and only really surfaces
explicitly at moments. That's the racial division of
the country, which, obviously, is something that everyone is so strongly focused on
in our culture today. Of course, it comes in and out,
but it's always in the background, and even going back to the
tension between the father and grandfather in Gilead. It's a diversion of this
question of otherness. I wonder if anybody would like
to say anything about their sense of how the racial dynamics
play out in all these writings? Maybe you want to comment on that. >> GERALDINE BROOKS: I think that that's perhaps the most
magnificent achievement of Gilead is that it is a story about love, and it's a very intimate
portrayal of love that does this. It's managed to digest this
elephant, which is who are you when conscience demands
something of you. There are so many different
answers given to that question. As Ames is writing to his young son, he talks about that
fierce old urgency. That is a such a great
characterization of the question that the Civil War
asked of everybody that was required to
live through it. Who are you? How did you respond? I lived for a while not far from
here in a Quaker town in Waterford, Virginia, which was
settled in 1733 by Quakers, and was one of the few places where
free blacks could live unharassed in Virginia before the Civil War. When the war came, a
number of young men in that town faced
the terrible choice, which was the greater
evil violence or slavery. Some of the young men in that town
made the choice to take up arms and fight against slavery,
but that meant that they were rid out
meeting in the town. And I think that those
choices that we make as individuals are
really what Marilynne is so exquisitely gifted at exploring. Who makes what choice? What are the ramifications of it? >> STEVEN KNAPP: Someone mentioned
earlier this numinous character of the ordinary that
I think comes through. You mentioned it coming
through in the teaching and coming through in the fiction. We haven't talked very much about
the rather pervasive role of weather or seasonal change, the
interface of the things happening on the edges of the town. The town is already
in the rural setting. Then, the way characters move
through that landscape and so on, and what happens to them in
their engagement with nature. I think you had an
interesting saying about nature. I think you talked about
Calvin's interest in nature as the shining garment of which God
has both revealed and concealed. It's a little bit related to what
we're saying with the physical but a slightly different
angle on it, I think. Maybe talk a little bit about
the role of the natural world, not as a physical universe,
but specifically the landscape, the climate, the weather,
the seasonal change. >> GERALDINE BROOKS: I think
the description of the lake in Housekeeping, the lake is
almost as important a character as any of the human beings. The lake has a voice. The lake has a presence. The lake will come, and
infiltrate your life, and change how you can live. I think that that modesty in
the face of nature is something that we all need to be a little
bit more ready to concede. >> PAUL HARDING: I think of it
in terms of, partially anyway, the transcendentalist tradition. I think of Emerson. I think of Wallace Stevens as well who I consider an honorary
transcendentalist, and Emily Dickinson. It reminds me of a line in
Housekeeping that I always think of when Ruth is in the
bottom of the boat. She bought him a boat, and
they're going across the lake. She's very tired. She closes her eyes,
and allows her mind to become coextensive
with the darkness. I think, when I read
landscape, I just read it as a projection of character. It's coextensive with character. Again, it's a phenomenological. It's experiential. Landscape does not exist
independently of the perception and the experience of it. So, there's a refractive
quality to it. The objective landscape
is being refracted through an experiencing subject. It becomes another
numinous, luminous, beautiful way of rendering
character. >> GERALDINE BROOKS: Also, I think,
another really indelible moment for me is the description of Ames
and his father at the grave site. It's an ugly piece of land. Then, in a moment, when it's decked
with light, it becomes beautiful. Again, it's a little bit Thoreau, "Only that day dawns
to which I am awake." >> PAUL HARDING: The sun is
setting, and the moon is rising, and they're creating
schemes of light. >> ALAN LIGHTMAN: Yes, I think too. >> STEVEN KNAPP: Yeah,
it's an amazing moment. Alan, as a scientist, how do you
think about the role of landscape? >> ALAN LIGHTMAN: I
think our relationship to nature is extremely
interesting and complicated. I think there's one metaphor
of nature, of Mother Nature that nature is going
to take care of us. The maternal feeling
that nature comforts us. Then, on the other hand, we have
earthquakes that kill thousands of people, natural disasters. I remember being out on the ocean
in a small boat for the first time by myself with my wife, and looking
around, and seeing nothing but water in every direction,
no land in sight. I felt like I was in a vast place
that didn't care about me at all. There was no sense of
some consciousness there. And so I think there's a tension
between these two different views of what nature is and our
relationship to nature that can be found in our
literature, and our history, and anthropology, and
everything else. >> GERALDINE BROOKS: At
least, you were there to notice that nobody noticed you. >> STEVEN KNAPP: That's
really important. >> ALAN LIGHTMAN: Yeah. >> STEVEN KNAPP: You
may have noticed that we have an empty
chair on the stage here. It's actually not for Elijah, which
is what you may have been thinking. I was certainly honored. I think we all would be if perhaps
Marilynne Robinson herself might join us on stage for a few moments. [applause] >> STEVEN KNAPP: I think the
idea now is that we'd invite you to react a little bit to what
you've heard, or add whatever you like to add, or take us in whatever
direction you want to take us. >> MARILYNNE ROBINSON: First of all, I have to say that this the
most self-indulgent fantasy I've ever had. >> STEVEN KNAPP: We try
to do that in Washington. >> MARILYNNE ROBINSON:
This is better than most. It's just fascinating. I couldn't be more pleased. I think that Paul had said something
very descriptive, which is that I'm so immersed in my own particular
habit of thought that I do tend to try to do variations on it, look
through it as a prism or a lens. I have become deeply immersed in
theology that I basically inherited, although I wasn't aware of it. A little Presbyterian
knowing nothing about what I was being taught. Then, I began to realize that it was
a serious theology highly available to me, and that I felt as if,
if you grant it its terms, it can tell you certain
kinds of things. Another theology might
tell you other things. This was the one that I
found myself engrossed by. And it has this certain emphasis. One of them is the idea, which you
find very much in writers of this, tradition especially
the earlier ones, that the beautiful is a signature of
God, and that it's almost a question of individual consciousness whether
or not you perceive the beautiful. And the assumption is more or less
that it is always there one way or another to be perceived. The beauty of creation is implicit. People have to learn how
to see in order to see it. The further you go into seeing
it, the more the richness of it becomes apparent to you. I find this to be a very, very
fruitful way for me to think, in any case, in the moment of
interaction between two people, what passes between them that
could be called beautiful. And another thing that I like very
much about it is the humanism of it, the assumption that every
encounter between two people, between one's self and another,
is a question being posed by God. And your question is, what does
God want from this interaction? The way in which it's
articulated as an idea is that the other being an image of
God virtually is God because all of interactions have that
degree of theological weight. The other is God. The other is Christ. Again, from the point of
view of making inquiries into your experience as
a mortal human being, there's almost no more radically
illuminating question than, "What would God want
from this situation?" because as it's articulated,
God either is the other person, or is very deeply sympathetic
with the other person. I think that's kind of an
aesthetic, an ethical aesthetic that is very moving to me. These are probably the
two assumptions that come out of my own religious
background or theology that I find to be most useful to
me as a novelist. >> STEVEN KNAPP: Very good. Are there elements of what you
heard from the panel up here that you wanted to push
back on in any way? >> MARILYNNE ROBINSON:
Dr. Lightman is going to know that I'm going to ... No. It comes down to a
question of what you call real. For example, if you look at
something, and trying to saturate it with an aesthetic value,
including the reality of the level of plank lengths, if
that is beautiful, then the beauty is a
thing that exist also. Do you know what I mean? There's that level of comprehension,
or understanding, or a perception that complicates the
idea of reality, I think, in an incredibly rich way. >> STEVEN KNAPP: Do you
want to say anything? >> ALAN LIGHTMAN: I agree
that nature is beautiful, but you mentioned reality. Scientists don't really
know what reality is. >> MARILYNNE ROBINSON: I know. >> ALAN LIGHTMAN: Wait. [laughter] >> MARILYNNE ROBINSON:
They say beautiful things about it all the time. >> ALAN LIGHTMAN: They say
beautiful things about it. I think philosophers, if
anybody knows what reality is, it might be philosophers. Scientists certainly don't
claim they know what reality is. Scientists, what we know as
scientists is the readings of volt meters, and what science
is about for us is the ability to predict where that needle
is going to go when you hook it up to a certain electrical circuit. >> MARILYNNE ROBINSON: I
think you're too modest. >> ALAN LIGHTMAN: We have theories, and I would say even
beautiful theories. >> MARILYNNE ROBINSON: There you go. >> ALAN LIGHTMAN: Mathematically
beautiful theories that try to predict where that
needle is going to go. Those theories have
internal beauties. Ultimately, we're not saying
anything about reality. Reality, to me, is a
very abstract conception that all we really know is
our experience with the world. >> MARILYNNE ROBINSON: I agree
that reality is a very elusive ... It depends on the scale at which
your attention falls on it, what it appears to be, et cetera. If that is true, then ... For example, if you show a theory
to another scientist, and he says, "That is not elegant,"
he's made a statement that he thinks has something
to do with reality, right? If you say it's beautiful, that
has something to do with reality. >> ALAN LIGHTMAN: No. I'm totally in agreement with you that scientific theories
can be beautiful, as well as the objects
they described. What science has found remarkably
is that the theories that we, human beings, deemed elegant
happened to be the ones that agree most closely with
where that needle is going to point on the volt meter. When a scientist says
to another scientist that that theory is
inelegant, it's not elegant, I don't think that she means that the theory doesn't
correspond a reality. I think that she means that the
theory probably is not going to agree with experiment because
we have found that elegance and our aesthetic judgments seem to
accord with the behavior of nature, which is a miracle in itself. >> MARILYNNE ROBINSON:
I love your language, but if you can use the word beauty,
and be mutually intelligible, and it has a predictive
power in terms of meters, if that's what you want to
say, then beauty exists. >> ALAN LIGHTMAN: I certainly agree. >> MARILYNNE ROBINSON:
Part of reality. >> ALAN LIGHTMAN: It exists in the
sense that various people can look at a painting, let's say the
Mona Lisa or some other painting that we know, Picasso Les
Demoiselles d'Avignon, and all feel that it's beautiful;
or read one of your novels, and you get a consensus that
is beautiful, whether or not that means the beauty exists
as an abstract concept out there in the universe. That's something that I
don't know, but certainly, if a lot of different
people can agree that a particular thing
is beautiful. >> MARILYNNE ROBINSON: If
it disciplines thought. For example, "That
theory won't work. It is not beautiful." That's not just an
aesthetic statement. It's a prediction about
the utility of- >> ALAN LIGHTMAN: It is. Again, I think it goes
back to the remarkable fact that our aesthetic sense, which
is related to what we consider to be beautiful, seems to accord
with the workings of nature because, by and large, the theories that we
have thought were beautiful turned out to be the right ones. When I say right, I mean in a
sense that they're able to predict where the needle goes
on the volt meter. >> STEVEN KNAPP: Apart from
the question of predictability and so on, there's another
way in which philosophers of science talk about, I think,
this conversation we're having. That's the question of what
are called emergent properties and emergent reality. And maybe that's another
way to get at this. That is from the phenomena that as
they occur in the natural world, there arise things like beauty. There arise things
like consciousness. There arise open all mind, which
on some accounts are just illusory. And that's a certain version of an
emergent theory as it plays itself out in philosophy debates about
science, philosophical debates. On another account,
those are realities. They're real properties that emerge from the actualities
of physical processes. Are you an emergentist just by any
chance, Alan, or anti-emergentist? >> ALAN LIGHTMAN: I agree with that
that there are properties of nature that cannot be understood
in terms of the workings of the individual pieces. When you put all the pieces
together, you get something that is qualitatively different,
not just quantitatively. >> STEVEN KNAPP: Might
you agree with Marilynne that beauty might be one of
those emergent properties? >> ALAN LIGHTMAN: Yeah. >> STEVEN KNAPP: Okay. [laughter] That's the other
way we do things in Washington. [laughter] I'm glad
to say, at this point, I think this might not be a
very good moment to do this. We actually have microphones set
up in either of the two aisles. For the interest of time, what we'd
like to do is find out if those who would like to ask questions
of Ms. Robinson or the panel, if you line up behind the
two mics that we have here. We'll go back and forth
between the two aisles. Anyone who would like to make
a comment, pose a question, we'll be delighted to have
lined up at this point. Again, they're a third
all the way up the aisle. I will get through as many as
we can in the next 20 minutes or so if anyone is
interested in doing that. If anyone wants to come down,
I think we have a couple of people who are approaching. I'll just start over here, house
left, stage right, here you go. >> AUDIENCE: Hello. This is loud. Hi. I've really been
enjoying this conversation. Thank you so much. I wanted to go back to something
that Paul said about Marilynne as a teacher, Ms. Robinson, that she
embodied the virtue of her beliefs. And I wanted to connect that to what
you were just talking about beauty. Do you feel that experiencing
beautiful objects, things makes us better people? >> MARILYNNE ROBINSON: I think
that we made better people by being attentive to beauty
perhaps in forms that have not yet been perceived as beautiful. I think it's much more a habit
of mine that is called for rather than disciplining one's
attention to what has already, by consensus, been called beautiful. >> STEVEN KNAPP: Very good. Sir. >> AUDIENCE: In terms of the
relationship between the spiritual and writing, when I was in high
school, one of my papers was about Robert Graves and the White
Goddess, this whole concept that art and artists are merely
conduits for the spiritual, and that either we work
at it or we're chosen. How much do feel that the
spirituality in this ... When I would write music, you used
to be a drummer in a band and so on, things happen that
you don't plan ahead, and they come out in the
story, and it takes on a piece of its own, and you lose yourself. You don't start off with, "This
is what I'm going to say," but you lose yourself in that. How much does that happen in terms
of, let's say, your view of the art of writing that you're dealing with? >> MARILYNNE ROBINSON:
It happens a lot. I don't trust what I'm
writing unless it surprises me. The thing that has been
really amazing to me is that I've written two
books, at a minimum, that I considered deeply
personal, deeply private books. Until I got a letter from my agent, I didn't think I would
ever publish Housekeeping. Then, you put these things out into
the world with luck, with health, and you find out that you
have actually said something that resonates among many people,
which is a very striking thing. It's one of those things I
wish we articulated better. I feel as if I write something
that I don't truly control. I can just feel that
there's a rightness that is emerging out of what I do. And then, to have other people
recognize it when the whole point is that I'm writing something
that you haven't read before. Do you know? It's an astonishing thing. I think that that feeling that
you have of having something pass through you is very much
a result of the fact that you lived very much more deeply
in a culture than you realized that you do or that you live in
a human community more deeply than you realize, and that
you really can talk to people in a way that's much more inward
than you would ever anticipate. >> STEVEN KNAPP: All right. >> AUDIENCE: Thank you. >> AUDIENCE: This is going
to be a tough one, I think. I have a friend of
mine who's an atheist. He says that the entire bible can be
boiled down to "Thy will be done." Everything else in the
bible is people trying to discern what God's will is. I'm thinking about the way
you talk about science. It sounds like you don't make
a heck of a lot of distinctions between how much you apply beauty
to good and evil, and to tragedy and perseverance in your novels. So, my question is, how
do you discern God's will? [laughter] >> ALAN LIGHTMAN: Wow. >> AUDIENCE: 15 minutes. >> PAUL HARDING: You're
on the clock. >> MARILYNNE ROBINSON: Exactly. I cling to basic prohibitions. No idolatry, no killing,
no stealing. You know what, again,
this is what I just ... My life surprises me all the time. There are things that attract my
interest, things that I want to do. I do them. They satisfy my do-no-harm ethic. Then, they have another
content beside. I hope they're consistent
with the will of God. I would find that to be
a very pleasing idea. Who knows? >> GERALDINE BROOKS: Did I
imagine this or did you boil down the bible somewhat differently
at one point into cut it out? >> MARILYNNE ROBINSON:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Why did the nation
so curiously rage together? Stop doing that. >> GERALDINE BROOKS: While
we're on discerning God's will, we haven't talked about your
book about Sellafield at all. I just wondered if you might
say a few words about that. >> MARILYNNE ROBINSON: My
main book of my entire career, from my point of view, is a book that nobody else has read
called Mother Country. Thank you for your attention. It's about a plutonium reprocessing
plant on the coast of England that has made the Irish Sea, the most radioactive body
of water in the world. It's a whole elaborate
hideous industry that involves building
reactors that have waste that cannot be stored over time. They're graphite-moderated reactors. They've sold them all over the world
or they're built all over the world. Then, these things come back to
the coast of England to be stripped down into a form that
will not combust, or burn, or whatever as this wastes would do. Otherwise, they can't be stored like pressurized water reactor
wastes have been so far. In any case, to strip these things
down requires nitric acid and so on. A great deal of what is derived from this wastes are bomb-grade
plutonium, bomb-grade uranium, et cetera, other salable
isotopes, whatever. Out of this very inefficient system
of stripping down that's been going on since the '50s, it goes down
the pipeline in the Irish sea. This has happened for
so long at such scale that it has affected the
Scandinavian countries, Iceland, so on. I hardly mentioned Ireland itself. I wrote about this because
I was living in England, and I got information from
various respectable sources like the London Times
that this was going on. So, I wrote the book about it. People in England read it. They talk to me about it. They're not shocked
because, of course, it does come from places
like the Times. People in the United States are
not attracted to the subject. They don't want to know that this is
going on so very near Dove Cottage. What if they do? So, that's Sellafield. >> ALAN LIGHTMAN: Gosh, wow. >> MARILYNNE ROBINSON: I did feel that I was religiously
obligated to write that book. >> ALAN LIGHTMAN: Okay, good. >> AUDIENCE: Each of you has used
the word belief more than once in this really lovely
and lively conversation. In a rather straightforward
orthodox, if you will, understanding belief is
an intellectual ascent to a propositional statement. I believe in God, the Father
Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and so on and so forth. I wonder if you can say something
more about the relationship between belief and story, or
perhaps faith and narrative that complicates belief
a little bit more? >> MARILYNNE ROBINSON: I
don't have a credo belief. Yes, I can recite the Apostles'
Creed without difficulty. At the same time, I
don't feel belief at all as if it were itemized,
and if there were boxes, I have to check, or
anything like that. For me, it's basically a
posture of questioning. What is in this moment? What is in this event? With the assumption that
everything is incredibly precious, that nothing that happens,
however inexplicable, is done with that reference
to the fact that everything is very precious. It's not a state of repose for me. The credo statements, I find that
they are human origin, I would say, and maybe some of them are
not exactly on the point. That's fine with me. >> AUDIENCE: Yeah, thank you. >> MARILYNNE ROBINSON:
You're welcome. >> STEVEN KNAPP: We'll
go to this side. >> AUDIENCE: First, I just like
to say that it's an honor to be in the presence of so many
of my favorite writers. Thank you for bringing
this conversation together. Marilynne, I've read Gilead more
than once and deeply love the book. And I think one of the
most powerful aspects of Gilead is the complicated
relationships between fathers and sons in a general sense. I think, a lot of times, readers
focus on one of those relationships between a father and a son. For me, it's the trio of the grandfather, the
father, and the son. I think, history is so
pervasive in Gilead. I think it's so important
in the three generations, and the message is that
Gilead is conveying. I like you to speak more
about that relationship between history and fatherhood. In this moment in time, I just can't
help but think about the importance of abolitionist history, and
the moment that we're in, and that the narrator aims. He thinks so much about
his grandfather, and the abolitionist moment that
he lived in, and he's living in the Civil Rights moment. >> MARILYNNE ROBINSON: Yes. When I went to Iowa, I'd
always live either in Idaho, or Massachusetts, or Rhode Island. I was always one end of
the country or the other. Then, I found myself in Iowa. I wanted to know what the
history of the place was, the culture of the place was. Inevitably, Iowans would
say it has no history. Of course, you can't have two
people in one room for three hours without having a history. So, I started doing all
kinds of primary research in the 19th century writers
of various sorts and so on. I found out that there's this
beautiful forgotten history of these little towns that
what was on the frontier that were established in order to
inculcate an ethic of abolitionism in the middle west,
very successful at that. They tend to be based
around colleges. One of the things that
struck me when I moved in to the middle west is
that the oldest buildings on the landscape are
typically little colleges or churches, and/or churches. These people would buy land from the
government, which was very cheap. They would build a college. They had patrons. They would build a college. Sub-congregation from Massachusetts
or somewhere would come out there and settle a place. Then, when people moved west, they wanted to be near
a college or a church. The property values would go up. Then, they would use it
to underwrite these things that they had built, and
also to start new towns with new colleges, new
churches, and so on. And so, you got what was crucially
important for American history, a very anti-slavery middle west
that produced people like Lincoln, and Grant, and Sherman, and so on. And also, a tremendous portion
of the union army in the period, the later stages of the war. I saw for myself a
remarkable history of very, very great importance
that was forgotten within a very short period of time. Here, the people are still
living among these things, going to these schools, and
so on, and still have many of the cultural qualities that
came from them like, for example, no segregation in schools, no anti-miscegenation laws,
these kinds of things. So, anyway, the phenomenon
of historical forgetfulness at that level with all the loss that
has suffered because people were out there doing admirable
things that if we have persisted in them would have saved
us all kinds of misery and reinventions of
wheels and so on. People actually thought,
when I was a child, that integrating schools was
a novel idea when these parts of the country had integrated
schools before the Civil War. The cultural forgetfulness can
be just a devastating loss. That's one of the things that's a
major subject of the Gilead novels. >> STEVEN KNAPP: Okay. Let me say that we're down
on our last few minutes. Perhaps, what we can do is I'll
take half of the room in turn. We have three on this
side, two on that. Perhaps, if we could take the three
folks that are lined up over here, and if you could each just
ask your questions in turn. We'll store them up. Then, see what parts of them either
Marilynne Robinson or any members of the panel might respond to. We'll start with you. >> AUDIENCE: Sure. Yeah, thank you all
for being here tonight. This is lovely. Early on in the conversation,
someone mentioned the setting of Gilead not being able
to imagine Gilead in a time after Time Magazine could have
a cover asking, "Is God Dead?" As someone whose consciousness
doesn't exceed too far back through the distance,
I wonder in a lot of these conversations what
spiritual consciousness has been if it has been lost? How do we articulate
that as something more than maybe just declining
church attendance? Then, following on to that question, where do you all find
the most interesting and compelling articulation of faith and imagination moving forward
especially in our public conscience? >> STEVEN KNAPP: Thanks. Yeah. >> AUDIENCE: I actually wanted
to ask about Mother Country. I'm glad someone else brought up,
definitely Ms. Geraldine Brooks. It's a very striking book. I was very intrigued by the
premise of Mother Country or one of the premises that America has
a more generous social ethic than, at least, Great Britain
in certain respects. The book delves into not only
the actual nuclear power plant, but also the history of
British social reform, and the principles that informed it. I was wondering whether
you could comment on how you interpret current
political events in America in light of the principles of
British social teaching, and then American social norms
that you investigated in that book. >> AUDIENCE: Thank you. This has been a really enlightening
conversation in many ways. My question is really prompted
by the gentlemen who asked about belief and by your response. It's motivated because in my
own life and in my own research, I think much more about
religious practice than I do about religious belief. When you speak about belief
as not a static place, I'm wondering about practice. I'm wondering about
moments when belief falters. I'm also wondering about the ways
in which people enact and live out their commitments
and those actions. Just what kinds of
connections you would make between belief and practice? What practice might look
like sometimes in the absence or the faltering of belief? >> MARILYNNE ROBINSON: I don't
think that belief is faltering. I think of myself as faltering. It happens to be true that
the fusion of the aesthetic, metaphysical, and the
scientific so far as I understand is
very satisfying to me. It seems pretty standing to me. If I find myself not sufficient
to it, I don't blame it. Do you know what I mean? I think that any religion
teaches practice. I think that certainly
Judeo-Christianity teaches generosity and compassion. And that that is the
essential practice, I think, in both of those faiths. I think also that faith is
rejuvenated by the practices that are central to
it like compassion. As far as England and America, there's always been a very
complex relationship between them. That is economic, as
much as anything. If you look at laws that
control the working class in 19th Century England and you look
at the laws that enslaved people in the south, they're
almost identical. There is a history of exploitation
of the working class in England. People used to talk
about wages slavery. That was the term for it. They had every reason
to call it that. The movement, the impetus behind
the economics that I criticized in Mother Country as being British
is simply the idea that everything at best is reduced to liquid money. That's capital. That means you squeeze the money out
of here, and you can put it there, and squeeze the money,
and put it there. If we, for example, start selling
national assets, we will be taking on economic assumptions that are
very close to our British origins. The idea that actually
capital, to use Marx's word, is the ultimate form of property, and that anything else
is basically reducible. It has the value of
what can be reduced to in terms of liquid wealth. That's why you get
things like Sellafield. That was certainly my conclusion. It generates a great deal of money. The cost of it is not a cost
that is felt by the people who appreciate the wealth
that is generated by it. When you have that assumption,
all sorts of barriers go down. >> STEVEN KNAPP: The first question,
I just want to pick up one element of it, which I thought
was intriguing. Do you feel having set your novels,
as we said, the three has said, in the distant but not too distant
past at a time before the death of God entered the culture, have we
lost a spiritual identity since then or is it just a continuation
of the same story? Do you see a discontinuity there? Where do you see the
seeds of hope in terms of what might be a spiritual
element in today's culture? >> MARILYNNE ROBINSON: I have
traveled around quite a bit in Europe, as well
as the United States. Especially in Europe,
interestingly enough, and Britain, I'm asked about theology. I've given long newspaper interviews about theology in Italian
newspapers. It's really quite striking. I have come to the
conclusion that the secularism of the western world is about
an eighth of an inch deep, and that thinking in other terms,
thinking in spiritual terms, in terms of faith comes
profoundly naturally to people, and that they're simply
embarrassed to engage thinking that people will call naïve
were so terrified of that word. There's this other conversation that
goes bubbling along at the circus. God is dead and all this stuff, which of course is
in one of Luther's. To speak of the radical
event of the crucifixion, he uses the sentence, "God is dead." It has even a religious
context before Nietzsche made it into something else. In any case, there
was no such event. All of this is simply saying
to the public we're supposed to pretend we don't
believe that stuff anymore. But, I just think it's
contrary to human nature to say faith was something that
kept us going while we were young and impressionable. Then, it just vanished away. I don't think that's
descriptive of it at all. >> STEVEN KNAPP: Thank you. So, quickly, just the
last two questions, if we could just get those uttered. Then, we'll see if we have time to maybe say something
very briefly about them. >> AUDIENCE: Absolutely. I hope I can take just a
second to thank you all for a wonderful and
enlightening talk. You, Marilynne, especially, for a series of just
powerful moving novels. I heard you all talked quite a bit
about some of the visionary aspects of faith and belief,
and the role of beauty in Calvin's thought, in particular. One of the things that
was striking to me in the Gilead trilogy is a different
strain of Calvin's thought. It's the use of the
doctrine of total depravity, the way that Jack Boughton
conceives of his own experiences, fears that he might be dammed,
and the raw difficulty that, especially Ames and
Boughton's father have in trying and not quite succeeding at
forgiving him, and not being able, perhaps, to play the role of
the father, the prodigal son in the way that they want to. I was wondering if you could
speak a bit to the relationship between those visionary
aspects of religious thought and the moral drama
that we find especially in the second half of Gilead? >> STEVEN KNAPP: Okay, thank you. >> MARILYNNE ROBINSON: Yes. Robert Boughton does
nothing but forgive Jack. Moment to moment, his whole
theology is based on forgiving Jack. Jack doesn't forgive himself. Every theology has
complex working parts. The idea of falling short is, I
think, intrinsic in every theology. To see, to experience beautiful
demonstrations of belief, and the forgiveness,
and all the rest of it doesn't necessarily
mean that you're alright. Do you know what I mean? I'm talking basically about what
I considered to be a phenomenon of faith that is very general
in religious traditions. At least, Jack has
the ultimate benefit that it's really not up to him. He can know, and it's a new roll of the dice every time
someone goes to his reward. >> STEVEN KNAPP: Thank. Thanks so much. For the last question, briefly. >> AUDIENCE: This question
is for anyone on the panel. The way everyone has been
speaking this evening about beauty reminded me of a
radio story that many people in the audience might have
heard recently about a man who lost the ability to
produce testosterone. And he describes going
for these few months. He experiences everything
as being beautiful. He describes it as a
completely objective way. He just stops judging things. He would see a crack
in the sidewalk, and think that's beautiful. I, maybe, should add at this point that women also have
testosterone as well. At the same time, he also lost all
motivation to do anything as well. I was just wondering if maybe
this presents a kind of metaphor about a certain attention
between not judging things, and experiencing them as
beautiful as they are, and at certain attention with acting
and imposing your will on the world in a way where you might have a
certain vision of beauty of your own that you maybe also want to interact
with the material or outside world. >> STEVEN KNAPP: So, your concern
is, what effect duty might have on agency, it might be, in
some ways, debilitating? >> AUDIENCE: Or not,
a lack of judgment. >> STEVEN KNAPP: Yeah. >> AUDIENCE: Yeah. >> STEVEN KNAPP: Anybody
wants to take that? Got a quick response there, Paul? >> PAUL HARDING: Why me? No. I think it's easy
to become habituated to a culture-rated thinking. So, I think it's easy to
become habituated to thinking that what you think is thought,
when in fact it is not thinking. I think I got that three
negatives to make a positive. At least, in the context of
how we've been talking about it up here is that, on a certain
level, it's a technical skill or it's almost like a muscle,
you have to habituate yourself to the discipline of seeing beauty, but it's a beautiful paradoxical
discipline because what it is, it's cultivating the ability to stop
imposing your will on what you see. That's very anecdotal, but
just reserving judgment, not acting as if you know what
you're looking at, and really trying to cultivate the habit of
being, as I stated earlier, but in that strict
sense, being innocent. You don't know what
you're looking at. Then, a crack in the pavement
is likely to be quite beautiful, and have its own little
ecosystem or something. The idea too that the closer and the more sustained attention
is, the more depth of ... The universe observation will
almost accommodate whatever depth of observation you
choose to lend to it. It will always come into more
and more beautiful resolution. I think that's one of the
things that we talk about a lot, just the position and
you how you read it. It becomes a dialectic between the
infinite and the infinitesimal, and the way that you can go down
to the smallest, tiniest detail. It's just so beautiful. Then, suddenly, it
just will open back up onto the whole universe
in a certain way. It's almost like a
feedback loop or something. That's just my ... >> STEVEN KNAPP: I
think that sounds really like the right balance
of testosterone. >> PAUL HARDING: That's
what you're shooting for. >> STEVEN KNAPP: That's
a little strike. All right. We are actually at
the end of our time because we have a couple
of things to do. I want to turn the program
back to the Director of the John W. Kluge Center, Before
I do so, let me ask you to join me in thanking our guest
of honor and the panel. [applause] >> TED WIDMER: What a
wonderful inspiring evening. Thank you so much for coming out. Let's not only applaud our
prize winner, but our panelists and moderator who did
such a good job tonight. [applause] >> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc dot gov.
