Anchorage
Early in Marilynne Robinson’s Jack (2020), the fourth of her Gilead novels, Della and Jack have this exchange, trying to work out where a person’s true self is anchored:
‘I really just meant that there is—anyone, any human being, and then that person’s actual life, everything they didn’t mean or couldn’t say or wished for or grieved over. That’s reality. So someone who would know the world that way, some spirit, seems kind of inevitable. I think. Why should so much reality, most of it, count for nothing? That’s how it seems to me.’
‘That spirit would not always be impressed, depending on case.’
She shook her head. ‘I just think there has to be a Jesus, to say ‘beautiful’ about things no one else would ever see. The previous things should be looked to, whatever becomes of the rest of it.’
