Re-reading Gilead

The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.

–Flannery O’Connor 

This sentence by Flannery O’Connor describes the sensation I have always felt in reading the fiction of Marilynne Robinson. I experience the world Robinson creates in the same immersive way I move through a dream. I am wrapped up in it, suspended. After it’s over, I am disoriented, but at the same time more acutely aware of the world around me, as if my senses have been sharpened. 

I first read Robison’s Gilead over 20 years ago, and at the time I wasn’t captivated by it. Gilead is an extended letter written by a small-town preacher, John Ames, to his seven-year-old son. Ames is dying and he intends the letter to be read long after he is gone, when his son is an adult. Beyond the letter, nothing much happens in the novel. There’s a lot of recollecting and theologizing. Ames’ godson Jack Boughton comes home and stirs up some tension. And then leaves. 

I remember thinking, “What’s all the fuss about this novel?” I couldn’t latch onto the significance. I was missing something, and I didn’t know what it was until years later, on my second read, after I had been sufficiently pummeled by life, by the losses and heartaches that are bound to accumulate.

Now, I find myself captivated by this story of an aging preacher preparing to say goodbye to life. Now, I blubber shamelessly, especially at scenes like this: 

It was dark when I woke up and the house was empty so I went out to the porch. You and your mother were sitting on the swing, wrapped up in a quilt. She said, “This might be the last mild night.” She made room for me beside her and spread the quilt across my lap and rested her head on my shoulder. It was just as pleasant as could be. This summer she planted what she calls her owl garden, I being the owl in question. She read somewhere that white flowers are most fragrant at night, so she planted every white flower she could think of along the front walk. Now there are just a few roses left, and alyssum and petunias. 

The scene is deceptively simple: Ames sits on the front porch with his wife and child and takes in the flowers she has planted. But it is miles deep in meaning. His wife Lila was an abandoned child, a depression-era vagabond who survived deprivation and loneliness and eventually found her way to Ames’s small town. She is socially awkward, out of place in a home, and she struggles to show her feelings, even with those she loves most. But she has a talent for gardening, and so she plants the white flowers as an expression of affection for her husband, trying in the best way she can to love him before he is gone. 

Flannery O’Connor notes that the word symbol “scares a good many people.” But symbols are essential to fiction, she argues:  “You might say that [symbols] are the details that, while having their essential place in the literal level of the story, operate in-depth as well as on the surface, increasing the story in every direction.”  

Lila’s garden operates on a literal level–it describes and enriches the physical setting, and it tells the story of her efforts. But it can also be read as a symbol of her love, a self-offering, a balm intended to soothe the physical and mental anguish of her husband. Like any human effort, though, the garden has limitations. Winter is coming and the flowers are dying.

In the decay of the garden, however, the narrator reveals even more beauty, as if the remaining flowers–the roses and petunias and alyssum–increase in value by their approaching demise. In the final blooms of this garden, in the moment the narrator is sitting on the porch next to his family, savoring their warmth for one of the last times, we experience not only the physical reality of his story, but the agony of living and dying, the problem of existence itself.

This experience of re-reading Gilead again several years later, the change in impressions it has made on me,  raises a question: Is it possible there are some works of art, literary or otherwise, that we cannot appreciate before having reached a certain age, or having experienced certain things?  Or can the universals of good art reach us at any point in life? Thoughts?