Howzzat!

One of the most endearing things about novels that span generations is the opportunity to visualize the era gone by – ambitions, ideologies, confrontations, ambiguity and (or within) religion. Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer prize winning novel Gilead (2004) is one such novel that effortlessly retains a sense of timelessness, through a style of narration that comes across as deeply contemplative. Gilead is an  epislatory , epistlery , epistolary (phew) novel, narrated in the form of a letter. The year is 1956. John Ames, an ailing third generation pastor, writes to his seven year old son - a son who, he acknowledges, will grow up not knowing him. In a tone that's confessional, affectionate but never overbearing, Ames recounts the lives of his passive father and his radical grandfather, his  sedentary life in the laid back fictional town of Gilead, his sensitivity to the Christian faith, his eventual marriage with a much younger woman and his tryst with his namesake and adversary...

Presence is a great mystery, and presence in absence, which Jesus promised and has epitomized, is, at a human scale, a great reality for all of us in the course of ordinary life. I am persuaded for the moment that this is in fact the basis of community.   “Imagination and Community” is an essay by contemporary American novelist Marilynne Robinson published in 2012 among her collection of essays “When I was a child I read books”. Robinson believes “the more generous the scale at which imagination is exerted, the healthier and more humane the community will be.” She insists it is imagination which spearheads a community, into loving people who are not personally acquainted with one another, on several “grounds”. It is with these conditions that she finds a problem with, as they cause boundaries to be drawn, limiting the role of imagination. “… They insist that the imagination must stay within the boundaries they establish for it, that sympathy and identification are only allowabl...