WONDERFUL CREATURES: An Interview with Marilynne Robinson
Sept 14, 2020 | By Raquel Sequeira TD ‘21+.5
“If you ever wonder what you’ve done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God’s grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle…It’s your existence I love you for, mainly.”
– Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
For a writer (read, historian of theogy, Shakespeare scholar, professor of creative writing, essayist, and novelist) Marilynne Robinson is delightfully enamored of science. When I spoke with Professor Robinson about the theme of “wonder”—after taking her class “Shakespeare in Theological Context” at the Yale Divinity School during the COVID semester—I was surprised to find her as effusive about the prodigality of nature as she had been about Renaissance theology. At the same time, she ever inspires a deep awe for the human creature. The conversation that follows took place on May 29th, 2020. Some edits have been made for length and clarity.
Raquel Sequeira: I’ve been thinking about the relationship between “wondering” like asking a question, and “wonder” like a sense of awe. Can you talk about the diversity of meanings the word can hold?
Marilynne Robinson: I think of [wonder] as autonomic, I don’t think of it as historically or culturally established. I think it’s just human. And I think that what it means as experience is that the normal modes of understanding what is perceived are felt to be inadequate—that what there is for a moment or permanently, there is the thing forever. I think about the Easter Island statues, those great staring eyes with the sea all around them: whatever else, it has to be a symbolic rendering of how much experience exceeds the commonplace or the controllable.
And wondering in terms of inquiring, again, I think that means that you are looking for the terms in which you can understand something. “I wonder why that happened,” it means that you can’t yet bring conventional modes of understanding to what you perceive. Often, wondering is a more accurate response than whatever succeeds it as understanding.
RS: Does wonder rightly lead to a satisfaction of curiosity or that need to put words to something you don’t yet have terms for, or is wonder itself is the right response?
MR: I think that wonder is meaningful in its own right. I don’t think it’s necessarily meant to lead beyond itself...I think of the really potent fountains of wonder in our civilization as being Psalms and Job and the Ascension—things that are seen in their own right as statements about the nature of human existence in the universe. And I think now that we have such a huge universe to consider, wonder is an element in almost all scientific thought.
In this strange situation that we’re in, think of the potency and resourcefulness of this virus that has virtually none of the qualities of a living, conscious thing and yet is so multivalent and even seems shrewd. Here it is, a nothing, virtually, the nearest thing to nothing, and it can bring civilization to a halt. Even if they begin to make better descriptions of what viruses are, that would still be amazing.
RS: In that context, how do we balance the desire to maintain a sense of wonder as something good in itself with the need to let that wonder drive us to action?
MR: As far as maintaining a sense of wonder, I think Creation sort of took care of that. The scale of everything, the fact that a tremendous force exists inside the atom—which is another thing that almost doesn’t exist—the fact that that the universe is accelerating and the rate of its expansion, there are all things that if you think about them, however you might describe them in trying to find useful descriptions from a scientific or philosophical point of view, the fact is that they remain wonders.
The Psalmate is very important on this subject: the improbability of our circumstance, the fact that we’re on this little dot of a planet in a raging, roaring, exploding universe, that we somehow or other have seasons, that there are great regularities and constancies that are true only within this little atmosphere, that’s just amazing. And however you might describe it, when you come back to the essence of it, it’s just amazing.
RS: Do you think in our society there’s a lack of recognition of what seems just obviously wonderful?
MR: I think that’s definitely true. I think people tend to be under-informed as far as how astonishing things really are. I was looking at this book by Bill Bryson about the body,[1] all the trillions of cells and all the incredible finesse of the tiny wiring inside the human cell, it’s inexhaustible…He says that if the threads of the genome in the human body were stretched out it would reach past Pluto. I think if you look at the history of science, as recently as Einstein and in the 50’s, they still considered the Milky Way to be the whole universe. And the Milky Way is an impressive object, it seems amazing that you could sort of condescend to it; nevertheless, it has been far exceeded in terms of what the borders of the universe might be.
I think that the triumphalism of science during the time when it seemed to control the atom, seemed to understand the universe, got baked into general consciousness. People have to be talked back out of it again.
RS: If that’s the problem in our society and culture, is there a cultural solution, or is it up to individuals to reengage a right sense of wonder?
MR: Well, you know, individuals are society collectively viewed. People that write things about the cell or about the brain or about the universe, they’re educating common opinion. If they succeeded in addressing the public as well as they ought to, we’d have more respect for ourselves than what a human being actually is, because we’ve been very dismissive. We have simplified our notions of humankind almost to the point of disappearance. In any community, there are voices that are ahead of the general consensus, and that’s true of us. But you can’t make the distinction between the individual and the collective.
RS: How did we get to the state where we can be so complacent about both the universe and human beings, in spite of the fact that it seems so obvious that these things are wonderful?
MR: Well, there’s a kind of a lag. I think that many people now are very aware of what a human being is. People talk about re-sacralizing humankind, and I don’t know if I’d use that language because intrinsically, we’re amazing creatures. But we’ve let things slide. There was a time, I think, when there was a much livelier sense of what we are and what we are capable of… But we have talked ourselves down. This has been true for a long time. People—it drives me crazy—they have one thing that is true of human beings, and that’s either Freud or it’s Marx or whatever, but it’s always a question of what is the one motive, what is the one central feature of human consciousness.
RS: Should we engage with wonder by examining small questions rather than making generalizations?
MR: Well, you know, I would not generalize about generalizations...I think it’s very important for us to be able to say words like “humankind”—to assume that at some level, as difficult as it might be to articulate, that generalization is important and possible to make. Everything leads, I think, to basic human circumstance. If you look at how the immune system works, it’s just insanely complex and brilliant and resourceful. If you look at the history of a country, it produces some kinds of patterns and predictabilities that no one on might have seen. So both generalizing and being highly detailed are important.
RS: How can we bring our reason into partnership with wonder?
MR: I think that there is some historical impulse—at least in the Western world—to try to work reason free from wonder...[But] to discipline reason by freeing it from wonder often minimizes the question. You don’t put the reason on one side and wonder on the other in the question of what is true. And to understate the complexity of virtually anything seems to me to travel together with the impulse to be only reasonable or only rational and to exclude wonder.
RS: What do you think about this seeming conflict between reason and wonder in the nature of faith?
MR: I think that a lot of people, in a way that is never apparent, perhaps even to them, live much of their lives in a dialogue; and it’s particularly present for them when they feel the discomfort of conflict. In other words, I think of faith as something that you live with over the long term rather than its being an isolated creedal statement or an acculturated set of doctrine. Again, it seems to me as if religion is largely directed to the fact that we are amazing creatures in an amazing circumstance. So the idea of a super-addition of wonder to the basic truths—the grandeur of God and so on—might be harmless, but it’s also redundant.
RS: It’s inherent, I guess.
MR: So it seems to me. I mean, there’s a lot of poetry to that effect.
RS: Can you talk about the role of poetry and language in mediating the ineffable part of wonder and the desire to articulate it and incorporate it into our consciousness?
MR: We have this idea of the meaningfulness of the word “merely”—is language merely a social construct—which is really displacing the incredible complexity of language on to the incredible complexity of a social construct. Very often, when people use reductionist reasoning, it’s like squeezing a balloon: they’ve simply pushed the complexity of the question off the margins, but they have not legitimately reduced the complexity of the question. In so many ways, I think language is as amazing as anything.
The fact that even in English, which is huge, we have basically a finite number of usable words; and yet continuously, every English-speaking human being on earth is
making a novel utterance, finding some new variation on what would seem to be the finite number of possibilities.[2] It’s not finite in any normal sense, but think about the fact that we share something so profoundly that is so profoundly individuated. And you’ve noticed I don’t like theory; but one of the problems with theory is that it assumes a lack of vitality in language, a sort of static quality that really is not—it’s not language.
RS: This is why I marvel at the Psalms and all of Scripture as metaphor for the incarnation. Another question related to faith and wonder is how wonder is related to goodness. Wonder seems kind of like beauty, which is often related to goodness and truth; but it can also be misleading. Things that seem ugly can also be wonderful and true. What’s the relationship between the aesthetic of wonder and the truth of what is wonderful?
MR: Well, wonder is highly subjective. Whether or not you find wonder in something depends on what assumptions you bring to it. Somebody can write a symphony with the intention of inspiring wonder in a hearer, and the hearer hears no wonder. I think that we can try to create beauty, we can try to amaze, but whether or not this succeeds depends on how it’s perceived, which means that there’s a mode of address, an intrinsic hope that some audience will understand what you say in the way you intend to be understood. But that synapse cannot be assumed.
RS: But you think the wonder of nature is undeniable?
MR: Oh, absolutely. I mean, did you read those articles about the naked mole rat?[3]
RS: No, though I’ve seen them at the zoo…
MR: Well you’re ahead of me there. But they can actually live in extreme oxygen deprivation. And when they do, they go from metabolizing glucose to metabolizing fructose, which means they behave like plants. There are a thousand amazing—I will not tell you all the stories I learned about naked mole rats, you can look it up. But this little wretched creature that basically lives underground in the dark, an entity of no obvious significance, has this amazing contrivance built into its little body. Its ugly little body can rescue it by leaping across species boundaries. It’s amazing. And the mere fact that [scientists] have described it enhances wonder rather than diminishing it.
RS: Why is it that there’s more subjectivity to the wonder of human artistic creation?
MR: If you look at contemporary culture, there are all sorts of essentially new arts that can have any degree of importance, particularly films and varieties of music. The impulse to make things and to refine and to elaborate on the making of things is profoundly human. What we do that other cultures have not done—and I don’t mean America specifically, but contemporary global culture—is commodify them. The fact that you can buy them and sell them and turn them off halfway through minimizes the fact that they are intrinsically wonderful and perfectly human. There is nothing in the universe that seems to bear any comparison. And even if you watch a wretched movie, but there are five minutes in it where it seems as if something true is said or some emotion is captured, it’s amazing, just amazing.
People always talk about post-literate culture (which is obviously not happening), but we are so inundated with the invention of narratives in every form that though we live by them, we don’t acknowledge that they are amazing things. They’re all basically the worthy or unworthy offspring of The Iliad and The Odyssey.
... I just do think that if we knew enough about anything, it would inspire wonder. The history of some common household object—if you knew who brought it over in that leaky boat and who buried it when storms came over them and all the rest of it—anything that is a carrier of human intention and human history is amazing if you know it.
RS: Wonder inspires you to seek out more knowledge, and the more knowledge you have, the more cause for wonder. So maybe it’s a positive feedback loop. [4]
MR: I think you’re right.
RS: And it seems like part of what it means to be human—the ability to comprehend anything about the universe given our smallness in it.
MR: Right. I think it’s very moving to think how tiny the earth is in the universe. It doesn’t exist, virtually, on the scale of things that exist in the universe. And yet somehow other we’ve contrived to see billions and billions of miles. We are the consciousness of the universe even though we could wink out and it would make no substantive difference in what the universe is—but a huge, essential difference if you imagine that self-awareness within the universe is a wondrous thing.[5]
RS: To wrap up with some more practical questions: How are you and how would you encourage others to seek out, enter into, or create wonder in a time when we are isolated from one of the most wonderful things, the ability to be in incarnate relationships with other people? What does wonder look like in a pandemic, especially in our relationships and our faith?
MR: Well you know there’s the ancient custom of fasting. What fasting does is sensitize you to bread. We’ve been away from each other in a way that I think will give a tremendous enhancement to that day, whenever it comes, when we are actually together again. Everybody that I’ve talked to—you know, all three of them—their sense of what matters and who matters has been pretty deeply revolutionized by the fact of having the commonplace fall away, having it there to miss and long for.
From the point of view of Christendom, I don’t think it’s a bad thing that this happened during Lent. I think it is a huge sensitization to ordinary life, to all life. We found out that the creatures in the woods have been waiting for this day—they’re sleeping in the roads in Africa.[6] How quickly they realized that we, the great nuisance, were gone. Who knew, what an amazing thing to learn.
RS: Does that new perspective give us a moral imperative to consider how, practically, we want to live differently and consider our fellow humans differently after this re-sensitization?
MR: I certainly hope so. It could, or it could be such a desperate rush back to the old order that people don’t realize that other options have been made open to them. The economic order that existed before this was extremely fragile, and we didn’t realize it until the little thread snapped and the whole thing fell apart.[7] I don’t think many people actually know what they will find when they go back. I think people who had authority based on money will continue to, even though they perhaps have no basis for their wealth anymore. We have to bring a more critical eye to bear on what we take to be inevitable and necessary. I hope people do that.
RS: Final question: What’s the most wonderful thing that you’ve done since being quarantined, and do you have any recommendations to other people for movies or books or activities that can inspire wonder from our homes?
MR: I’ve gotten into this habit of watching old television series…It’s very poignant now because they often use dramatic cityscapes and landscapes. And if you look past these tedious little events (they’re always about murder) there’s this glistening world, these fantastic cities. Everything that we didn’t notice because we assumed it was there—it could be a world that’s closed against us now…It’s so labor-intensive, the sheer cost of maintaining the civilization that we’re used to, you wonder if that will be sustainable…You know they always say that when an astronomer looks at a star, they’re seeing light that’s already perished; maybe we’re looking at the light that has already perished out of that civilization.
RS: Slightly bleak...
MR: Well, you have to take “human being” entier. This civilization will go through the things that civilizations do. That’s its whole life.
1. Bill Bryson, The Body: A Guide for Occupants (New York: Penguin Random House, 2019).
2. For a comedic articulation of this idea, see: A Bit of Fry and Laurie, episode 2, “Concerning Language.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ij1pZvv9m0g
3. Jason Bittel, “The mystery of the great naked mole-rat migration,” The Washington Post. May 14, 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2020/05/14/mystery-great-naked-mole-rat-migration/
4. Consider how physicists have described quantum theory: “For those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possible have understood it” (Niels Bohr, cited in Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations (New York: Harper & Row, 1971)). “The more you look at it, the more mysterious it seems” (Richard Feynman, “The interference of electron waves,” The Feynman Lectures on Physics, (California Institute of Technology, 1963)).
5. For an alternative perspective on intelligence in the universe, see: Raquel Sequeira, “Dr. Karin Öberg: Planetary Formation, Faith-Shaping Books, and the Beauty of an Intelligible Universe,” BioLogos, June 16, 2019. https://biologos.org/articles/dr-karin-oberg-planetary-formation-faith-shaping-books-and-the-beauty-of-an-intelligible-universe.
6. Helen Sullivan, “You can’t leave that lion there: big cats nap on road in South Africa amid lockdown,” The Guardian, April 16, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/17/you-cant-leave-that-lion-there-big-cats-nap-on-road-in-south-africa-amid-covid19-lockdown.
7. Marilynne Robinson, “What Kind of Country Do We Want?” The New York Review of Books, June 11, 2020. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/06/11/what-kind-of-country-do-we-want/
