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Chapter Five Gilead: A Rumor of Angels God is the ground of being. —Paul Tillich “‘Everything is full of gods,’ exclaimed Thales of Miletus. Biblical monotheism swept away the gods in the glorification of the majesty of the One, but the fullness that overwhelmed Thales continued to live on for a long time in the figures of the angels, those beings of light, who are witnesses to the divine glory.”1 In the midst of the business of life, “some have entertained the angels unawares”(Hebrews 13:2). In Gilead the Reverend John Ames of the small town of Gilead, Iowa, can be said to entertain the angels unawares as a witness to the divine glory. Gilead makes central the perception of Being, in Heidegger’s sense of the term. Almost anyone would have been struck by James Wood’s observation that in Marilynne Robinson’s prose in Gilead, “silence is itself a quality, and . . . the space around words may be full of noises.”2 James Wood is right about the effect she achieves. And what he saw pulls an immense amount with it, as Joan Acocella recognized in another very fine article.3 Gilead brings forward characters who are both memorable and representative of large and difficult ideas made concrete through prose. Marilynne Robinson slows things down much as in an old-fashioned epistolary novel such as The Sorrows of Young Werther, Clarissa, or Julie; or, The New Eloise. Using a variation of this epistolary form, she allows moments of special experience enough time to live in the mind of the attentive reader. Gilead consists entirely of a long letter written by the Reverend John Ames; it does have a plot, but it does not drive the reader urgently ahead. Rather, the letter, while recounting incidents, establishes a meditative pace, inviting you to read patiently, and soon with wonder. Precisely that is the philosophical point of the book: the 99 experience of wonder, of Being. Writing about Proust, Paul Valéry once said that “unconsciously we lend the characters of a novel all the human lives which exist in us potentially.”The prose of Gilead acts with unusual power to evoke in its reader the capacity for experiencing the moment, to hold the moment steadily in the mind before it loses its immediacy and vanishes into time. Set in the small and declining Iowa town of Gilead in the year 1956, the narrative consists entirely of a long letter written by the local Congregational minister John Ames, seventy-six, to his son,“not quite seven,” by his second and much younger wife. The Reverend Ames has been diagnosed with angina pectoris and knows he will die, probably soon. He wants the boy to read this meditative autobiography in letter form much later, when perhaps he will understand it. In the town of Gilead out on the bleak prairie, not a great deal happens, except that everything happens. In the three generations of the Ames family we glimpse a decisive part of the history of the United States, including the migration westward, the Civil War, and variations in American Protestantism . And, now, we also glimpse the experience by Ames of what once was known as holiness, and for which the barrenness of the prairie might seem the necessary condition, as he achieves a concentration of mind that enables him to see, to hear, and to reflect on his senses, unusually alive, and through his senses experience the moment in an unusual way: “I have lived my life on the prairie and a line of oak trees can still astonish me.” In Gilead the individual moment sometimes possesses weight: There is a reality in blessing, which I take baptism to be, primarily . It doesn’t enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is a power in that. I have felt it pass through me, so to speak. The sensation is of really knowing a creature, I mean really feeling its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same time. There was a young couple strolling along half a block ahead of me. The sun had come up brilliantly after a heavy rain, and the trees were glistening and very wet. On some impulse, plain exuberance, I suppose, the fellow jumped up and caught hold of a branch, and a storm of luminous water came pouring down on the two of them, and they laughed and took off running, the girl sweeping water off her hair and her dress...

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