I am reading

Marilynne Robinson's new book, Absence of Mind, is a non-fiction defense of interiority and consciousness against the popular sociobiologists, "parascientists," as she says, that have made religion and altruism the punching bag of biological and social evolution. The book is good, and convincing, and at times a little too heady, not for the subject, but for me. But here I thought I would inscribe a paragraph of her final chapter that I found particularly moving:

Then there is the odd privilege of existence as a coherent self, the ability to speak the word "I" and mean by it a richly individual history of experience, perception, and thought. For the religious, the sense of the soul may have as a final redoubt, not as argument but as experience, that haunting I who wakes us in the night wondering where time has gone, the I we waken to, sharply aware that we have been unfaithful to ourselves, that a life lived otherwise would have acknowledged a yearning more our own than any of the daylit motives whose behests we answer to so diligently. Our religious traditions give us as the name of God two deeply mysterious words, one deeply mysterious utterane: I AM. Putting to one side the question of their meaning as the name and character by which the God of Moses would be known, these are words any human being can say about herself, and does say, though always with a modifier of some kind. I am hungry, I am comfortable, I am a singer, I am a cook. The abrupt descent into particularity in every statement of this kind, Being itself made an auxiliary to some momentary accident of being, may only startle inthe dark of night, when the intuition comes that there is no proportion between the great given of existence and the narrow vessel of circumstance into which it is inevitably forced. "I am Ozymandias, king of kings. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair."

Does it not sound as if that paragraph had been lurking in her mind, waiting for the correct context in which to reveal itself? My sense of this sentence, that a sentiment and expression like the one above has always been true but waiting for the moment of articulation, is also my sense of why scripture is so powerful, and at times exhausting. I get the same sense when I read the poetry of George Herbert, but his syntax is even less startling and abrupt than Robinson's here. I am impressed. The "narrow vessel of circumstance" against the "great given of existence." This pairing is more an argument for the universality of great art than any I know.

When I was writing my dissertation chapter on The Winter's Tale yesterday, the passage above kept creeping back into my brain (I had read it that morning in a simultaneous metaphysical soul gaining and biological plasma draining experience), and one of my own final paragraphs oddly came to look like this:

It seems everyone wants a shot at “reading” the final scene of The Winter’s Tale. “How do you read the final scene?” I am often asked, “Is it redemptive or ambiguous?” After all, I am told, Hermoine does not say much, Mamillius is still dead, and Leontes is still a monster. I have often answered that I see it as redemptive, but for every reason I give as to why, there is a solid refutation. In the course of all this, I have often wondered what really is the cause of my “optimistic” reading of the final scene. Am I prey to a version of Shakespeare that sees his plays as life-affirming? Am I one of those who does not see beyond his own self-deceptions? Is it because I am sympathetic to a redemptive view of religion, marriage, and family? Am I giving in to my darkest patriarchal impulses? This hint of self-doubt is probably productive, but it also has me looking in the wrong places. All of these questions ask me to distrust my “sense” of things, to question my own felt experience in favor of someone else’s narrative that supposedly knows better, illuminating my self deceptions with rational readings that systematically illustrate the “darkness” of the play. Perhaps a better question would be, how did I initially get the impression that the play’s final seen is optimistic and redemptive? That I can answer, and do so honestly, looking inward at the emotional experience of seeing the play.

I don't know if this particular sentiment will remain in the chapter--it does appear awfully subjective for a dissertation--but I can see now how it is clearly influenced and haunted by Robinson's thought that the I AM is the single most profound, and frightening, fact of ourselves. That sense of experience, as thoroughly inward as can be imagined, ought to be considered a little more, and it ought to be respected a little more as a thing contained within a biological body, or brain, or whatever, but also completely beyond itself. What a piece of work is man, after all.