Gilead - Marilynne Robinson [87]
Then he put his hand to his face, his eyes. It was dark, but I could recognize that gesture. He has made it his whole life, I believe.
I said, "It has been a great happiness to your father, having you here."
He said, "The man's a saint." "That might be true, but it was still good of you to come." "Ah," he said, as a man might when a chasm has opened at his feet.
So there was a silence of a few minutes, and then your mother stood up and lifted you out of the quilt and carried you away to bed.
"I have been glad to see you, too," I said, because I really was, for old Boughton's sake.
To that he made no reply. "I say that quite sincerely."
He stretched out his legs and leaned back against the porch pillar.
"No doubt," he said. "Stack of Bibles."
He laughed. "How high?" "A cubit or so."
"That'll do, I guess."
"Would two cubits put your mind at ease?"
"Entirely." And then, remembering his manners, "It has been good seeing you again. And meeting your wife. Your famiiy-" Then we were quiet for a while.
I said, "I'm impressed that you know Karl Barth." "Oh," he said. "From time to time I still try to crack the code."
"Well," I said, "I admire your tenacity."
He said, "You might not, if you understood my motives." Of all people on this earth he must be the hardest one to have a conversation with.
So I said, "That's all right, I admire it anyway." And he said, "Thanks."
So we were just quiet there for some time. Your mother came out with a pot of hot cider and cups, and she sat there quiet right along with us, the dear woman. And I spent the time thinking how it would be if Jack Boughton were indeed my son, and had come home weary from whatever life he had, and was sitting there still and at seeming peace in that peaceful night. There was a considerable satisfaction in that thought. The idea of grace had been so much on my mind, grace as a sort of ecstatic fire that takes things down to essentials. There in the dark and the quiet I felt I could forget all the tedious particulars and just feel the presence of his mortal and immortal being. And a sensation came over me, a sort of lovely fear, that made me think of Boughton's fear of angels. Now, I may have been more than half asleep at that point, but a thought arose that abides with me. I wished I could sit at the feet of that eternal soul and learn. He did then seem to me the angel of himself, brooding over the mysteries his mortal life describes, the deep things of man. And of course that is exactly what he is. "For who among men knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of the man, which is in him?" In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable—which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.
Maybe I should have said we are like planets. But then I would have lost some of the point of saying that we are like civilizations. The planets may all have been sloughed from the same star, but still the historical dimension is missing from that simile, and it is true that we all do live in the ruins of the lives of other generations, so there is a seeming continuity which is important because it deceives us. I am old enough to remember when we used to go out in the brush, a lot of us, and spread out in a circle, and then close in, scaring the rabbits along in front of us, till they were trapped there in the center, and then we would kill them with sticks and clubs. That