the textured richnesses of very modest lives

I recently read Tinkers, Paul Harding’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, and I’d like to share some favorite excerpts and invite you to ponder them with me. The book is more discovery than story; I had to slow myself down to cherish each paragraph. Of the book, Marilynne Robinson remarked, “Its fine touch plays over the textured richnesses of very modest lives, evoking again and again a frisson of deep recognition, a sense of primal encounter with the brilliant, elusive world of the senses. It confers on the reader the best privilege fiction can afford, the illusion of ghostly proximity to other human souls.”

On the human condition:

“Your cold mornings are filled with the heartache about the fact that although we are not at ease in this world, it is all we have, that it is ours but that it is full of strife, so that all we can call our own is strife; but even that is better than nothing at all, isn’t it? And as you split frost-laced wood with numb hands, rejoice that your uncertainty is God’s will and His grace toward you and that that is beautiful, and part of a greater certainty, as your own father always said in his sermons and to you at home. And as the ax bites into the wood, be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it. And when you resent the ache in your heart, remember: You will be dead and buried soon enough.” (p. 72)

A little bit about the wind:

“A wind would come up through the trees, sounding like a chorus, so like a breath then, so sounding like a breath, the breath of thousands of souls gathering itself up somewhere in the timber lining the bowls and depressions behind the worn mountains the way thunderstorms did and crawling up their backs the way the thunderstorms did, too, which you couldn’t hear, quite, but felt barometrically—a contraction or flattening as of tone as everything compressed in front of it, again, which you couldn’t see, quite, but instead could almost see the result of—water flattening, so the light coming off of it shifted angles, the grass stiffening …” (p. 128)

On our limits:

“And as an ignorant insect crawling across the face of that clock, who sees not the whole face, the full cycle of numbers, the short hand and the long … but who merely treads over the surface which hides the gear train and the springs without any but the most indirect conception of what lies beneath, so does man squirm and fret on the dusty skin of our earth, ignorant of the purpose of the world, indeed the cosmos, beyond the fact that there is one, assigned by God and known only to Him, and that it is good and that it is terrifying and that it is ineffable and that only rational faith can soothe the desperate pains and woes of our magnificent and depraved world.”

As we begin another week of Advent waiting, this last portion prompts me only to say: Come, Lord Jesus.

morning sun on a merry mini tree

Our mini tree is by the bookshelf this year; its spot in the window is taken by plants seeking shelter from the cold. I think Borges is glad for the cheery company (see upper left corner).