DISCIPLINE OF SOLITUDE ESSENTIAL FOR NOVELIST
Robinson searches for a ‘deep loveliness’ we are conditioned not to see
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, theologian, essayist and thinker Marilynne Robinson was in Vancouver in February as a guest of UBC’s Regent College, where she spoke to packed audiences on the theological virtues, Hope, Faith and Love.
Robinson is working on a new novel and during arrangements for this interview, her assistant wrote to say that Robinson had gone into “deep seclusion.”
The virtues of solitude marked the starting point of our conversation, which took place at UBC’s Gage residence.
“My life is half deep seclusion under most circumstances, but when I really seek it out I walk into my study in New York and it comes back to me like some very strong memory, this feeling of simply focusing. It’s been very fruitful for me,” she said.
Robinson, who grew up in Idaho, said she was “brought up to think that lonesomeness, that being alone was a very privileged thing.”
“There was a tendency where I grew up for people to seek out isolation. They didn’t want to be able to see another house from where they were living. People who grow up outside of that culture don’t understand it. They don’t understand that it’s actually emotionally very dense, and interesting to have that time with oneself.
“Much more is possible in our minds than we normally have access to, simply because we don’t ask for it, we don’t make that kind of demand on our minds that allows another kind of thinking. Solitude and the habit of concentration within a certain setting takes me directly to that other kind of concentration. It’s a discipline.”
There is a “whole mass of rich, deep loveliness” in the world that we have been conditioned not to see, said Robinson
“To be aware of the beauty of the environment is an act of presence. Human beings have this tendency to be urgent even about very minor things, and make very peripheral things that are central and amazing and splendid. We have to continuously navigate against these kinds of impulses because they make us small.”
Although theology is one of the frameworks through which Robinson examines the world, fiction provides another way of understanding experience. “Fiction opens up reality in a very, very authoritative way,” she said.
For Robinson, writing is “wonderful,” though not easy. “The difficulty of writing cannot be overstated,” she said. “On one hand you are thinking, you have some notion of how something should be, and then you have your own ability to articulate as language whatever it is you have on your mind, sentence by sentence and you find out it’s very difficult to create a meeting place between the thoughts that you have and the language that is available to you. It’s odd. You realize that you don’t think in words, because if you did you’d find you could more or less transcribe an idea.
“You realize that you have an idea which can be inaccessible to you in terms of your language, and frankly I think whatever it is that is not going into words tends to be a little smarter than whatever it is that gives you words. It’s very interesting. But it is a struggle. It seems quite literally a struggle.”
Robinson said she doesn’t formally plot her novels. “I learn by going where I have to go,’” she said, quoting Theodore Roethke. “If I write a sentence that seems to me pregnant and alive, then I try to be sensitive to what the life in it is. To carry forward. The sense of the voice and the sense of the characters are the disciplines of the prose; at the same time I am very open to anything that surprises me.
“I have a sort of esthetic sense that is compelling to me, that if something strikes me as beautiful — the kind of beauty that is moving to me is the sort of vernacular, unexpected day-to-day-life sort of beauty — I meditate on it, in effect, by writing about it.”
Deep seclusion may be a voyage inward, but she is also on a voyage outward, actively engaged in public discourse. The current political climate in the United States has surprised her. “The great problem today,” she said, “is fear.” Robinson chooses hope over fear.
“I wrote something in Housekeeping all those years ago that I still mean: ‘To cease to hope would be the final betrayal.’ Hope is the salt of the earth and I could not give it up without feeling that I had done something wrong.”
It’s difficult to create a meeting place between the thoughts that you have and the language that is available to you.