Gotham Diary:
Courage
16 January 2015
Yesterday, the dermatologist took five biopsies, two from my back, two from my forehead, and one from my right arm. Five. I have never had more than two taken at one time, and it’s certainly not the case that it has been a while since my last exam. Today came the good news that only two of the five are a problem, and the even better news that the dermatologist herself will burn one of them off — next week, right before I head a few blocks further downtown to the Mohs surgeon’s office, where a growth will be removed from over a cheekbone. (We’ve known about that one for a while, but there was no hurry and I asked to wait until after the holidays.) Good news, as I say — but it doesn’t have the punch that good news used to have. I don’t dwell on it morbidly, but I cannot overlook the fact that bad news, really bad news, cannot be too far off. It may even come unannounced.
The awful truth is that I didn’t turn sixty-seven last week. I turned “practically seventy.”
***
In this week’s issue of The Nation, there is a review of Marilynne Robinson’s Lila (by Roxana Robinson), followed by excerpts from an interview with the members of the magazine’s staff. The full interview can be heard at TheNation.com/robinson-interview, and I’ve just listened to it. It lasts a little over an hour, and so far as the first half of the discussion goes, the excerpts capture Robinson’s thinking more effectively than the more tentative recording. But then Robinson goes on to discuss things that don’t come up in the excerpts at all, such as the relative excellence of American higher education (compared with that of France and the UK, where she has taught), or the oblivion that has descended upon the history of integrated communities in the North prior to the Civil War, or the essential un-Christianity of insisting upon compliance with established Christian doctrines. She talks a lot about courage, too — often the subtextual subject of the essays in When I Was A Child I Read Books. Not battlefield, fireman courage, but what I would call simple, everyday courage — mindful of the paradox. For Robinson, this sort of courage is not unlike physical fitness. If you exercise it, you can depend upon it. You get into good shape. You worry less about offending other people with your thoughtful views on important matters, and, as a result, your views become more thoughtful. As in her nonfiction (and as is implied throughout the Gilead trilogy), the American experiment is held to be a success, something to be proud of. “Liberal” is a good word, conveying the biblical injunction to “open wide thy hand.”
The whole history of liberalism as a movement was lost because the name was removed from the file. Do you know what that is? It’s cowardice: “I’m afraid to say a word that somebody else will react to badly.” How insidious that is! Unbelievable, to me.
Indeed, the audio is studded with what sound very much like moments of stunned silence. And this, in the offices of The Nation! It’s reminiscent of a story that Robinson tells about “preaching” in a Unitarian Universalist church: she was informed even there that the world “liberal” is no longer used.
And yet, listening to Robinson hammer away at this point (with a lovable, grandmotherly insistence that would be very well played by, say, Lois Smith, whom Robinson somewhat resembles), I began to ask myself if it had not been necessary to put the word liberal away precisely because it had for so long represented a movement, a movement disliked by many Americans. Unless the liberal movement were retired from public discourse (at the liberals’ bidding!), would it have been possible to tinker as extensively as we have done, in the past thirty years, with the status of women, with the freedom of men and women to act according to their sexual preferences, and even with our requirements for a President (a black man may well be followed in office by a white woman)? I talk of tinkering deliberately — particularly with regard to changes on the sexual-preference front. There may have been a movement to provide persons formerly known as homosexuals with heterosexuals’ rights, but even its most ardent adherents — perhaps those adherents most of all — were surprised by the speed with which, say, same-sex marriage has been legitimated throughout the land. This happened, I propose, not because of movements or activists, but because people of generous disposition did everything they could do, on a person-by-person basis, to persuade their neighbors that gays and lesbians are also their neighbors. They were already there, right next door, living their lives, and wanting only to live them more happily. It was the opposite of a movement. It required countless, countless acts of Robinsonian courage, particularly on the part of men and women who risked their oldest attachments by telling their families about themselves.
I do think that Robinson’s suggestion (whether she makes it intentionally or not), that liberalism be seen as a mainstream Protestant tradition, every bit as American as Washington at Valley Forge, is a beautiful one — as beautiful as her novels. What makes me bristle a bit is a certain elusiveness on Robinson’s part regarding Calvin and Augustine. Robinson says that it is un-Christian to exclude fellow men and women (such as her wonderful Lila) because they do not fully or clearly subscribe to “doctrine,” but she still wants to claim Calvin and Augustine, both of whom relied upon state power to enforce doctrinal orthodoxy, and both of whom were willing to coerce unto death, as Christians — important Christians. I don’t see how organized Christianity can regain its original holiness without drawing a line against the Calvins and Augustines who people its maturity. I don’t insist on chucking them out altogether, but they cannot be held up as models. They are important historical figures, yes. But we need other models for our piety. My suspicion is that new models will have to come from fiction — fiction very much like Lila. No human being in the real world could be so intimately and widely known to others and yet retain Christian humility.
But Marilynne Robinson herself is right up there with John the Baptist. (It can’t, however, go without saying: mutatis mutandis.)
Bon weekend à tous!