More on Marilynne Robinson

At an event of City Arts and Lectures, October 27, 2008, at the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco, I had the pleasure of asking Marilynne Robinson this question:

“My favorite line from Housekeeping is, ‘When she had been married a little while, she concluded that love was half a longing of a kind that possession did nothing to mitigate.’ Can you talk about longing and solitude in all of your books?”

Here was her response: “Hm. Interesting. I really think. I mean, one of the reasons that I write is that it feels to me as if there is a, you know, there is a frustrated richness in experience. And I know that that’s kind of. I think that we know more than we can convey, that we hope for more than the world can satisfy, that we are in a certain sense creatures of greater depth than the world can answer to.

And that’s why I like string theory ha ha. I mean, the idea that science can actually affirm in its way the possibility that there is a greater sort of depth and density in existence itself than our senses allow us to apprehend. This, to me, feels deeply consistent with other intuitions that I have about the world.

I think that one of the things that is interesting about any art, and about the reception of any art, is that when you listen to beautiful music or when you read a moving book it’s almost as if it awakens recognition in you, as if the emotion that it stirs pre-exists your experience of it, but you would never know that if it were not for the art.

And so it’s like there’s some paradox about our being very deep creatures, very emotionally rich creatures, who nevertheless are dependent on one another for access to what is most interior to ourselves. So, longing seems to me a sort of metaphor for a much deeper state of attention, and expectation almost, that people live with continuously and never satisfy.”