We are in the process of disabling our most distinctive achievement - our educational system - in the name of making the country more like itself.
Marilynne RobinsonTag: education
But there is something about human beings that too often makes our love for the world look very much like hatred for it.
Marilynne Robinson...when we condescend, when we act consistently with a sense of the character of people in general which demeans them, we impoverish them AND ourselves, and preclude our having a part in the creation of the highest wealth, the testimony to the mysterious beauty of life we all value in psalms and tragedies and epics and meditations, in short stories and novels.
Marilynne RobinsonTag: beauty condescension
To recognize our bias toward error should teach us modesty and reflection, and to forgive it should help us avoid the inhumanity of thinking we ourselves are not as fallible as those who, in any instance, seem most at fault. Science can give us knowledge, but it cannot give us wisdom. Nor can religion, until it puts aside nonsense and distraction and becomes itself again.
Marilynne RobinsonIf we do not know the character of being itself - I have never seen anyone suggest that we do know it - then there is an inevitable superficiality in any claim to an exhaustive description of anything that participates in being. And the assertion of the existence, or the nonexistence, of God is the ultimate exhaustive description.
Marilynne RobinsonTag: being
So perhaps the very idea of explanation is an error of anthropomorphism when it is applied to things that do not involve human intention.
Marilynne RobinsonTag: explanation
Earthly nature may be parsimonious, but the human mind is prodigal, itself an anomaly that in its wealth of error as well as of insight is exceptional, utterly unique as far as we know, properly an object of wonder.
Marilynne RobinsonTag: wonder human-mind
When we accept dismissive judgments of our community we stop having generous hope for it. We cease to be capable of serving its best interests.
Marilynne RobinsonNeed can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it?
Marilynne RobinsonWe live in a moment in which old conflicts, much altered during their subterraneous years, have boiled up again. The struggle to own the past so that it can be made to serve contemporary interests has led to gross distortions. But it is true also that the experience of any generation is inevitably a warped lens through which to view the thought and the actions of any previous generation, especially when there is a lack of rigorous historical perspective to correct for these distortions. This second consideration may go some way toward explaining the fact that there are not two sides to what would otherwise be a great national controversy.
Marilynne RobinsonTag: history historical-perspective
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