Part of my decision to get rid of most of my cable service grew out of my resolution these past few months to turn the TV off in the evening. I spend my working days plugged into two different computer screens, where I’m working, emailing, IMing and generally being bombarded by electronic communications. It’s insane.

Last summer was the beginning of my escape from the TV — I spent most evenings outside, in the backyard, with a fire in the firepit reading a book by the light of the Coleman lantern hanging from the apple tree. It was bliss. Now it’s winter, and the wind is blowing 40 miles an hour and I’m hunkered inside, but still trying to wean myself off the screens and remind myself that not only was I once a novelist, but that I love reading novels. I wanted to write because I love to read, love that feeling when you’re deep inside a book, inside another consciousness, inside another life. And so, a resolution for the new year, a book a week, and a review a week.

What I find alarming is how difficult it is to sit down to a book after spending my days all plugged in to the pulsing electronic world of the internet. It takes me a long time now to get  to the place where I can calm the jittery, jangly feeling of being “connected” all day on multiple electronic devices and begin to enter once again the quiet interior world of a book. It takes a long time for the interior voices to come forth. To allow one’s imagination to fire up again. (And if I feel this way, the girl who went through six different elementary schools with my nose always in a book, the girl who read The Second Sex on the New York subway one winter when I wanted something hard so I’d have to concentrate and wouldn’t have to fully experience the subway, well, then I hate to say it but no wonder the publishing industry is going under.)

At any rate, it’s been a joy to get back to reading again, especially since Marilynne Robinson has given us two new books in the last couple of years. It’s been 28 years since Robinson published her now-classic Housekeeping and for most of that time it seemed that perhaps she was going to be one of those novelists who write one great book, and that’s it. Which was fine. If I had even one book as amazing as Housekeeping in me I’d be more than happy. But then, suddenly, in the last two years, we have two new novels from her. Gilead and Home are bookends to one another — portraits of two elderly pastors in small-town Iowa, portraits of the spiritual challenges that parenthood brings to each of them. I’m sort of fascinated by the history of Protestant thought in American history right now — I think it’s the way Obama’s speeches are so full of allusions to Lincoln and Winthrop and King. I’m also a sucker for novels about how difficult it is to be a good person, and these fall squarely into that category.

These two books are deeply entwined with one another, just as the Ames and Boughton families have been entwined. While Gilead is John Ames’s story, and Home is the story of his oldest friend and fellow minister Robert Boughton, the two books magnify one another when read sequentially. Because it had been a while, I reread Gilead before picking up Home, and after reading Home I wanted nothing more than to pick up Gilead again and read it in light of the events of the second book. They are entwined the way memory is entwined, and they are mysterious to one another the way we are all mysterious to one another. The precipitating event of both books is the return of Boughton’s long-lost prodigal son, Jack. Jack, the boy who never seemed to fit in to his own family, the one they all adored, and who disappointed them again and again, fleeing for good after getting an illiterate farm girl pregnant, a girl and her baby who despite the ministrations of the remaining Boughtons come to a bad end and left them stained with an enduring shame. But then, after twenty years, Jack returns home, shaky and alcoholic and thin and wary and desperate in only the way that someone hoping to save his own life can be, and thus begins a story of one father’s enduring and tender love for the son he cannot seem to help. Both Boughton and Ames are Protestants of the Puritan strain — Boughton a Presbyterian and Ames a Congregationalist. I’m enough of a Catholic that all Protestants seem strange to me, and one of the enduring wonders of these two novels is the way they dramatize the lived experience of a Calvinist worldview. Jack’s struggle is, in many ways, with the doctrine of predestination itself — what if he is cast out, what if that is indeed, the source of his lifelong discomfort and self-consciousness? His father loves Jack with a deep and tender love: “So many times, over the years, I’ve tried not to love you so much,” he admits.  “I never got anywhere with it, but I tried.” And yet, Jack cannot seem to make a go of it: “Do you think some people are intentionally and irretrievably consigned to perdition?” he asks.

It is the glory of these two books that this question, that these big questions — how do we love one another, how does one live a life, how does one live a good life, what constitutes a good life? These questions take on the sort of desperate, if quiet, narrative tension that illuminates all great works — the stakes are high here, as high as they can be — will an elderly father’s heart at last be broken? will a life-long friendship survive? will a faithful sister’s love be forsaken? will a soul be irretreivably lost? In Marilynne Robinson’s hands, these novels shine with a quiet beauty, and will, despite the quietude of their setting, have you on the edge of your chair wondering, as one does with all the greatest books, what will become of these people?

The Dog Walk Sutra of a couple of weeks ago came out of my little project to finally memorize the Heart Sutra, and to dedicate at least a part of my morning dog walks to reciting it. Because that was such a success, I decided that maybe the morning dog walks might also be a good opportunity to memorize some poems. I’m not getting any younger, and my graduate work is fading farther and farther into the past, and although I am grateful for my day job at the Big Corporation, it’s not creative work at all. I had this nagging feeling that I was losing touch with something that had, for so many many years, been vitally important to me. So, for the past few weeks, I’ve been managing about a poem a week, which isn’t bad, as I walk back and forth through town to the dog park and back, my xeroxed copy of the poem of the week folded up in my hand, muttering poetry out loud, and sneaking a peek when I can’t remember the next line.

One of the things I’m discovering, of course, is that memorizing a poem forces one to pay close attention to the actual language. I did “Meditation at Lagunitas” a couple of weeks ago, a poem I’ve loved ever since my undergraduate days. In fact, Robert Hass was the first modern poet I discovered on my own, not through a class or a teacher, but by trolling the poetry aisle in my undergraduate library at Beloit College. Because the Beloit Poetry Journal was published there, we had a stupendous poetry aisle in our library, as well as the presence of Marion Stocking, who taught us all, forced us even, to learn to really read a poem. To look closely at which words the poet chose, what adjectives, what verbs — and who made us articulate why we thought the poet had chosen this set of words, in this order, and not some other alternative.  In memorizing “Meditation” — a poem I had big fragments of in my brain, but not the whole thing, I found myself surprised that Hass chose to use the word “idea” twice in the same sentence — in the third and fourth lines of the poem. I wouldn’t have noticed this if I wasn’t memorizing the poem, because the repetition made me stop, made me look back at the poem, “idea” twice, could that be right? the same word at both the beginning and end of the sentence? Hmm. Not the kind of thing I would have noticed as a general reader — if I was writing a paper perhaps, but my paper-writing days are behind me now, and I’m not really interested in that kind of writing any more. And after a week of walking back and forth through the streets of Livingston, I now have one of the poems which is dearest to my heart firmly lodged (I hope) in my head. There whenever I need it.

This isn’t about poetry being “good for you” in some sort of prescriptive way, like vitamins. I hate that idea. For me, this is about reconnecting with the love of words and sentences and sounds that made me want to write in the first place. Hass‘s line: ” Longing, because desire is full of endless distances” for example — a line that has so entered my being that it feels like a personal epigram. Or the sheer joy in reciting out loud the Yeats line, declaiming “And live alone in the bee-loud glade.” Just say it. Listen to the consonants and the way they roll off the tongue. For me, this project is as much about slowing down, and paying attention to language, and reminding myself of what it was I first loved, all those years ago as a teenager, crouched to see the bottom shelf of the tiny poetry section in the Lake Forest Bookshop where I found a book whose title held out a marvelous promise that “A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far.”  A wild patience! Is there any better phrase to describe the inner experience of high school? All of this seems to be sinking out of my daily life, a life in which I spend so so much time online, and find it increasingly difficult to concentrate on a whole book, or a whole poem, increasingly difficult to slow down and focus. And so, we’ll see. I dont’ know that memorizing poems while walking the dog will help any of this, but I do know that I’m having a lovely time doing it. And I’m now old enough, that I don’t care who sees me wandering the streets, a poem wadded up in my hand, muttering out loud to myself.
This week I needed a new poem so I opened the lovely anthology that Czelaw Milosz published several years ago, A Book of Luminous Things, and found “The Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver.

“The Wild Geese”

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You have only to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile, the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.