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- Here Was One
Here Was One
No. 13
Grant Hodges
September 10, 2023
What Are We Doing Here?
Dear Reader,
As a gift a few months ago I received Marilynne Robinson’s (b. 1943) latest essay collection, What Are We Doing Here? On several cross-country flights this week, I finally had the opportunity to read it.
Robinson is an interesting writer. Her debut novel, Housekeeping (1980), won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. But she didn’t publish another novel until her groundbreaking work, Gilead (2004), nearly 24 years later. Since then, she’s written three other novels, won the Pulitzer and a National Book Critics Circle Award, received a National Humanities Medal, and penned four additional essay collections, which cover subjects as varied as religion, early American history, and theoretical physics.
This week’s piece is from her essay, “Grace and Beauty,” from What Are We Doing Here?
Background
“Grace and Beauty” was originally written and given as a lecture by Robinson through Princeton University’s Comparative Literature Lecture Series in 2016. In the essay, Robinson describes her understanding of grace and beauty, as concepts and in her own writing, and how they relate to the human condition.
From What Are We Doing Here?
By Marilynne Robinson
I will add another word to the discussion, an old and philosophical word, entelechy, which means “the active principle of wholeness or completion in an individual thing.” I have been thinking about this word for years, since I found it in the introduction to an edition of Leibniz’s Theodicy, a book I seem to have begun at some point, to judge by underlinings and coffee stains, and then to have put aside, taking away no impression except of this one word and its definition. I love to look at old books for some of the same reasons botanists like to study old vegetable strains. They have not been through the often highly dubious process of refinement that have weeded out vigor and complexity, and flavor, too, from the contemporary language of ideas. Entelechy means “soul” in some contexts, which discourages its use. And it is teleological by clear implication. So I had this word in mind for years without having any use for it . . . .
Once I solved a word puzzle in a daily newspaper. It was a quote from Robert Schumann. It said that to compose music one need only remember a song no one has ever heard before. . . . I would never have expected to find a thought there that was so perfect an instance of its own truth, something I would not have thought to say but was more than ready to affirm . . . .
Through the whole length of this essay I have been trying to earn the occasion to say that our intuitions having to do with the way things are and become are real enough to participate in the elegance of meaningful complexity, which may be one definition of beauty, a necessary if not sufficient one . . . . The completion of a character or a fiction, a play or a poem, must have the look of teleology, a denouement that seems prepared and inevitable, that seems to have approached, not simply to have eventuated, to have arisen within the arbitrary limits imposed by every good choice made in the course of its invention, not as a foreshadowing but as a reality still imminent. Entelechy.
I suspect I have not mentioned grace at all. To me it means, among other things, a sense of our participation in the fullness of an act or gesture so that the beauty of it is seen whole, the leap and the landing. Ethically it means an understanding of the wholeness of a situation, so that everyone is understood in her humanity, the perceiver extending no more respect to herself than to others, understanding any moment as a thing that can bless time to come or poison it.
What It Offers
As readers, I think it’s important to sometimes consider why we read what we read, and, as a secondary question, why we like what we like. Robinson thinks, and I agree, that art should provide a measure of beauty and grace, which fuse together in her concept of entelechy.
There is nothing more aggravating—in a novel, a poem, a short story, a television show, or a movie—where there’s a big shift in the plot or in a character that was totally unforeseen and seems jarringly out of step with the rest of the work. If you watched the last season of Game of Thrones, you understand this aggravation. And the only thing more frustrating than disjunction is predictability—when you see immediately where the work is going.
In the passage above, Robinson rephrases the common saying that a great work of art must both seem surprising and inevitable. But she grounds it in our intuitions about wholeness, about complexity, about entelechy. We humans, Robinson says, are blessed with an inner sense of when something works artistically and when it doesn’t. She’s not the first to make this claim. Thinkers and artists have been describing this faculty—for identifying beauty and experiencing grace—for centuries. As Terry Eagleton once explained about Thomas Aquinas, the Thirteenth Century theologian, and his understanding of “form” in art:
For Aquinas, the soul is everywhere in the body precisely because it is what he calls, after Aristotle, the “form” of it, meaning the way in which it is uniquely organized to be expressive of meaning. The soul is not some sort of thing, but the distinctive way in which a particular piece of matter is alive.
I trust Aquinas, Aristotle, and Robinson that we have a special power to recognize “soul” or “form” or “entelechy” in a piece of art. And while I don’t think we have to like everything that meets this standard—there are plenty of poems and novels that “work” intellectually that I absolutely hate—what’s important is that we don’t turn a blind eye to it.
After all, every artist has the capacity to recognize beauty and grace in their work. Every audience member has the same. This incredible gift—to see into the soul of things—unites all of us, despite our individual tastes. This power is what allows us to feel the emotions behind a poem written centuries before. It’s what allows us to befriend characters wholly separate from us, in terms of culture, society, religion, etc. As Schumann intimated in Robinson’s quote above, this miracle is what allows us to be moved to tears after hearing music that seems so familiar and so striking; that is, music that we “remember” despite never hearing before.
Every time I read Marilynne Robinson, I want to listen for that kind of music more often, in works of art and in life.
*****
What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.