“Imagine a Carthage sown with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden? Light would force each salt calyx to open in prisms, and to […]
Tag: marilynne robinson
Maple Bread Pudding with Pralines
I’m afraid this last week of surgery finds me spiraling into heavier and heavier contemplation. What if these are the last opportunities I’ll have to touch bowel, to fire an anastomotic stapler, to stitch long incisions closed, to stand for seventeen hours around an open abdomen and enjoy the time passing as though we are […]
Pain Meteil
“For me writing has always felt like praying, even when I wasn’t writing prayers, as I was often enough. You feel that you are with someone. I feel I am with you now, whatever that can mean.” I met the person who wrote these words (from Gilead) today, Marilynne Robinson, my literary hero. We had […]
Rosemary or Parmesan Focaccia Bread
“Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars and the mutable, and finally has come to look and not to buy.” Marilynne Robinson, in Housekeeping This tangible is worth a finger or two. I ate, easily, six pieces. To mar this mutable seems a lovely thing. As close to purchase as it […]
Maple Glazed Oatmeal Scones
A bit of philosophizing if I may. In my narrative medicine session at Mayo yesterday, we read from an excerpt of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, a novel about a family living in rural Idaho by a glacial lake, and on the sly, a re-imagining of Moby Dick. I recommend this book more highly than most the […]