Marilynne Robinson Promotes Reason In Unreasonable Times
Time|March 12,2018

Marilynne Robinson Promotes Reason In Unreasonable Times

Sarah Begley
Marilynne Robinson Promotes Reason In Unreasonable Times

MARILYNNE ROBINSON IS A DISSIDENT, THOUGH SHE MAY not sound like one. The 74-year-old Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist and acclaimed essayist has made a peaceable career of rejecting commonly held opinions to look for a deeper truth. Her fiction and nonfiction alike have found a home in the hearts of American intellectuals like Barack Obama as well on best-seller lists. She’s a humanist, a Congregationalist, an artist and a student of history, and she makes her readers want to be more thoughtful people.

The essays in her new collection, What Are We Doing Here?, are mostly lectures that she gave at universities. The pieces are erudite, and often long. “I impose on the patience of my audience from time to time,” she tells TIME. “That’s a fact.” And though these lectures critique the “thems” of the world— politicians who exploit their constituents, journalists who reinforce “whatever gimmicky notion is in the air,” academics who lazily repeat the same scholarship—they are written in a way that assumes her reasonable audience will agree with her. “I suppose I don’t know how to write to an antagonistic audience,” she says. “I love questions, and often people ask very basic questions that I shouldn’t assume we agree about. In any case, they are very willing to entertain my ideas.”

This story is from the March 12,2018 edition of Time.

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This story is from the March 12,2018 edition of Time.

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