Saturday, December 27, 2008

Secrets


In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable--which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live...


Above is a passage from Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. The narrator is a 77-year-old, dying minister who is writing a book to young son, and this is some of what he wants his son to hear when the son is an adult.

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