The madness of the news these past few days has made me think of two very different writers. I’m bringing out some big guns. That’s not the right metaphor. If only words could, in the short term, as a practical matter, bring to bear the force of bombs and bullets. In any case, Marilynne Robinson has a line where she says:

This being human—People have loved it through plague and famine and siege.

That’s from an essay called “Facing Reality,” which appears in a collection called The Death of Adam. Admirers of Robinson’s fiction might be a bit taken aback by her non-fiction, which, while no less generous, is inarguably less gentle. “Facing Reality” is a full-throated, even thunderous, exhortation for readers to open their eyes and see “reality” not as a much maligned grind but as a miracle. This being human—people have loved it through plague and famine and siege…She goes on to say this:

What if we understood our vulnerabilities to mean we are human, and so are our friends and our enemies, and so are our cities and books and gardens, our inspirations, our errors.

In the original there’s no question mark at the end of that sentence. It’s less a question than a challenge. What if we did. What if we did understand vulnerabilities, ours and those of our supposed enemies (political opponents?), as proof that we’re all human. Tough pill to swallow lately. But not to do so, Robinson’s suggests— more than suggests— is to diminish our own experience on this earth, within our communities, within our families.

The other writer I’ve been thinking of this morning is Czeslaw Milosz, the great Polish poet who knew a lot about war and a lot about the dangers of having too much faith in ideologies and doctrines. In “Lecture IV” of his long poem, “Six Lectures in Verse” (Collected Poems): Milosz writes:

Reality, what can we do with it? Where is it in words?

A few lines down, he answers:

While here, I, an instructor in forgetting,

Teach that pain passes (for it’s the pain of others),

Still in my mind trying to save Miss Jadwiga,

A little hunchback, librarian by profession,

Who perished in the shelter of an apartment house

That was considered safe but toppled down

And no one was able to dig through the slabs of wall,

Though knocking and voices were heard for many days.

So a name is lost for ages, forever,

No one will ever know about her last hours…

To re-type this alone is to say enough.

Peter Orner is a novelist, story writer, and essayist—as well director of Creative Writing at Dartmouth. He's written two novels, three short story collections, and his essay collection, Am I Alone Here? Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Before moving to the region he was acting chair of the MFA writing program at San Francisco State. He's a former member of the Bolinas, CA Volunteer Fire Department and a current member of the Norwich VFD.

Previous Enthusiasms:

• Carin Pratt on Julie Otsuka’s The Swimmers
• William Craig on Rockwell Kent’s Witness
• Emma Nichols on Laurie J. Marks’ Fire Logic
• Jared Jenisch on Natalie Goldberg’s Three Simple Lines
• Allie Levy on Shea Ernshaw’s A History of Wild Places
• Rena Mosteirin on Hannes Bajohr’s Blanks.
• Peter Orner on Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma stories
• Carin Pratt on Sarah Winman’s Still Life.
• Sam Kaas on David Benioff’s City of Thieves.
• Kari Meutsch on Station Eleven, the book and the series