Bucket List: #7

I started reading Gilead by Marilynne Robinson which I found at a thrift store in South Carolina. I’ve earmarked so many pages that I had to blog about the parts I love. The writing is wonderfully calming. Being a rather intensely energetic person, I need calming things in my life. So today’s bucket list item is complex: thinking like someone who is dying, being calmed by the voice of a fictional character, getting halfway through a book in a day, letting a fictional book change the way I pray.

Here are the quotes, often whole paragraphs (hehe), I really liked:

Well, see and see but do not perceive, hear and hear but do not understand, as the Lord says. I can’t claim to understand that saying, as many times as I’ve heard it, and even preached on it. It simply states a deeply mysterious fact. You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it…

My point in mentioning this is only to say that people who feel any sort of regret where you are concerned will suppose you are angry, and they will see anger in what you do, even if you’re just quietly going about your life of your own choosing. They make you doubt yourself, which, depending on cases, can be severe distraction and a waste of time.

For me writing has always felt like praying, even when I wasn’t writing prayers, as I was often enough. You feel that you are with someone. I feel I am with you now…

In the old days I could walk down every single street, past every house, in about an hour. I’d try to remember the people who lived in each one, and whatever I knew about them… And I’d imagine peace they didn’t expect and couldn’t account for descending on their illness or their quarreling or their dreams.

The moon looks wonderful in this warm evening light… Light within light. It seems like a metaphor for something. It seems to me to be a metaphor for the human soul, the singular light within the great general light of existence. Or it seems like poetry within language. Perhaps wisdom within experience. Or marriage within friendship and love.

Transgression. That is legalism. There is never just one transgression. There is a wound in the flesh of human life that scars when it heals and often enough seems never to heal at all. Avoid transgression. How’s that for advice.

Pulitzer Prize Winner. She looks wise.

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