Night Stand

We are contemptuous of transient well-being, as if there were any other kind. Routinely discounting the preponderance of evidence is not the behavior of reasonable people, nor is devaluing present experience because it may be overtaken by something worse….

Powerless people can hardly demand coherency of themselves, since they must always react to forces they cannot trust, whose wiles they cannot anticipate. They are safe from responsibility, safe from blame….

Our civilization believed for a long time in God and the soul and sin and salvation, assuming, whatever else, that meaning had a larger frame and context than this life in this world. Polls indicate that we in America have not really abandoned these beliefs, and that is interesting, because what I have called our collective fiction is relentlessly this-worldly, very serious indeed about material success, of all things. Success, that object of derision in every wisdom literature ever penned, not more dignified now that it is so very slackly bound to real attainment, not more beautiful now that its appurtenances generally amount to a higher tawdriness. Knowing this, we nevertheless make it stand in the place of worth….

It is because we hope to acquire rather than to achieve –in the old language of religion, to receive rather than to give– that the good we imagine can truly be taken from our hands….

What if we understood our vulnerabilities to mean we are human, and so are our friends and our enemies, and so are out cities and books and gardens, our inspirations, our errors. We weep human tears, like Hamlet, like Hecuba. If the universe is only all we have so far seen, we are its great marvel. I consider it an honor to follow Saint Francis or William Tyndale or Angelina Grimke or Lydia Maria Child anywhere, even to mere extinction. I am honored in the cunning of my hand. This being human –people have loved it through plague and famine and siege. And Dante, who knew the world about suffering, had a place in hell for people who were grave when they might have rejoiced.

—Marilynne Robinson, “Facing Reality,” from The Death of Adam

Yet I turn, I turn,

exulting somewhat,

with my will intact to go

wherever I need to go,

and every stone on the road

precious to me.

In my darkest night,

when the moon was covered

and I roamed through wreckage,

a nimbus-clouded voice

directed me:

“Live in the layers,

not on the litter.”

Though I lack the art

to decipher it,

no doubt the next chapter

in my book of transformations

is already written.

I am not done with my changes.

—Stanley Kunitz, from “The Layers”