There was something about her. Her body language. A kind of aesthetic dignity she never forgot. She never relaxed away from it, even as a mother. When I say that people are too poorly suited for life in the world for this to be the definitive human condition, my mother is a very good instance of that, and my father is equally.
This is such a beautiful way to comment on our human existence. How you meet people who are so full of stuff that they can’t fit into our limited sense of peoplehood.
I have always been- always from childhood’s hour, as Poe would say- in the habit of feeling quite a stark difference between myself and the world I navigate. Which was any world I navigated. And then, at a certain point, I found out that that was a)very formative and b)probably an error although it was that discomfort that made me feel like writing, the feeling of difference.
I find myself very drawn to Robinson’s realization that she is less apart from others than she realizes. I really appreciated her ability to write loneliness as a ‘passion’ as opposed to a ‘condition’. I also think loneliness fuels my writing and my creativity. She captures a moment I have had, when you realize through writing and connecting, that the ‘stark difference’ is not as stark. In some ways you want to hold onto that darker reality in order to fuel the creativity.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/05/magazine/the-revelations-of-marilynne-robinson.html
Lights in the Hand 