MARILYNNE ROBINSON
ONE OF THE things I love about Emily Dickinson is the way that, every time I read her poetry, I feel as though I’m encountering it for the first time. It has this reserve of meaning that seems to open very slowly over a long series of readings. Part of that is due to the extreme compression of her poems, which strip away everything inessential, greatly magnifying the potency of each individual word. She puts an extraordinary pressure on language by her parsimoniousness. But she not only restricted her language very narrowly—apparently, she restricted her life very narrowly, too. Out of this came a body of poetry that really has no equivalent in American literature.
I’m drawn to that movement toward essentials, away from all secondary definitions, all extraneous props and ornaments. People always ask me why I often write about characters who have no name, and no place, and no money, and no anything else. Well, it’s in those circumstances that you can get real definitions of things and people and experience. Dickinson lived that out.
“The Brain—is wider than the Sky—,” one of my favorite Dickinson poems, is an instance where she achieves that sense of enormous scope in just a few short lines. It’s about the expansiveness of the mind, our incredible, anomalous ability to take on what is vast, abstract, and intuited. It celebrates our brain’s ability to relativize immensity in our favor, the fact that we can comprehend things that are totally out of scale with us.
Each of the poem’s three stanzas pits the human mind—Dickinson uses the word “brain,” but I translate that into “mind”—against vastness of a different sort. The first stanza focuses on the sky, which, she says, the brain can swallow with room to spare (for “you beside,” Dickinson writes—the self is also included in the capacities of the mind). It’s a trope of her Puritan tradition to be amazed by the human ability to understand the workings of the sky: the movements of the stars, the relative size and distance of the planets, cosmic measurements human beings worked out long, long ago. Our brains are large enough to contain and contemplate those faraway distances, using the stars’ alignment to do real-world things like navigate tiny ships across the sea—the topic of the second stanza. The brain, Dickinson says, is large enough to contain the oceans, too. She likens it to a great sponge, big and absorbent enough to pull all the world’s waters in.
In the final stanza, Dickinson suggests that our gift of comprehension is unlike, but also deeply like, God himself:
The Brain is just the weight of God—
For—Heft them—Pound for Pound—
And they will differ—if they do—
As Syllable from Sound—
For the first time, here, the scale does not tip our way—the brain is “just” the weight of God, a relationship between seeming equals. It’s interesting that she uses weight here, when, in fact, she’s talking about two things that really cannot be weighed. How strange that she would talk about God pound for pound, that heft would be relevant to the circumstance. It’s completely outside any conception of God that she could have been reading.
But the incomparability is her point. In order to assert a likeness between the brain and God, even to suggest how they might be compared, you have to move into language that is not appropriate to either one of them. If there is a difference, it’s the difference between utterance—“syllable,” which is us in the metaphor—and the capacity for utterance, sound. The end of the poem turns to this mystery—what other word could you use?—of a likeness that is absolute, and at the same time conditioned by the fact of our mortality. In four or five words she raises this metaphysical question of inexhaustible interest.
This final formulation puts a tremendous emphasis on human utterance, sanctifying it. It recalls “In the beginning was the word” in its suggestion that our language is somehow akin to God’s own creative power.
The theologies that are built around language are really onto something, I think. It’s extraordinary how language behaves like another huge mind, one that we can delve into at need. Think how much any individual mind, any brain, is enlarged by what we can know through books and through literature—places, people, ideas that we would never otherwise experience, things much larger than anyone could contain in his or her own person. People crave this. You go way back into antiquity and everybody’s memorizing Homer, everybody’s memorizing The Epic of Gilgamesh; works of literature like that build the cultural mind and make it capacious. Most of us are not the creators of those things, but we possess ourselves of them—or they possess us of them. And each successive work of literature expands the possibilities of our language, deepening our expressive capacity.
That experience instills a certain awe. This awe is the explicit subject of “The Brain—is wider than the Sky—,” but other works on different topics still serve the same function: They remind us how miraculous our potential really is. In almost every major literature there are works that make you love being human, and make you love and revere the humanity of other people. That is the great potential of any art.
Viewed this way, our language—and especially literature, that special, potent case—has incredible power. I’m very struck by something that I read from a seventeenth-century English writer, one who’s quoted by Jonathan Edwards. He talks about how whatever we say lives after us, that we continue to exist so long as any word we say exists in a living mind. And that there should be two judgments: one when we die, and one when the full impact of our lives has played itself out. That is, when every word that we’ve said, for good or ill, basically ceases to be active.
We’re not in the habit of thinking of ourselves as people of influence in this way. We don’t think that, if we say something cruel and destructive now, it can go down generations in terms of its consequences. But it strikes me that that’s true—and the thought makes me experience certain fear and trembling about our political life at the moment. When we speak, we should ask ourselves: How will this ultimately play out? What will be the moral consequence of the fact that so many people have resorted to such crude, cruel language? We know it won’t be neutral. We know it won’t evaporate. It’ll be in people’s minds for generations.
Coming across this idea as eloquently expressed as it was by this writer really made me stop, and think, and recognize the obvious truth of what he says—as if I’d known it before, but never feeling it so sharply as when he articulated it well. Which is a strange thing: Often, when I see a new idea I really love, my response to it feels like recognition. Even though exactly my pleasure in it is the fact that I hadn’t thought of it before. There’s a way in which aesthetics and ideas seem to appeal to a kind of foreknowledge. And you should bring that expectation to what you read. I imagine that people who don’t like to read poetry, for example, don’t come to poems assuming that they’ll find there something that, in some mysterious sense, they do already know. But it happens all the time. I spend a lot of time thinking about the mind, but I could not have articulated its vastness without the help of Emily Dickinson, even though I recognize what she says as something that I would wish to be able to say myself.
I have this experience of recognition, not just in response to others’ ideas, but on the order of a single word. It happens, in my own writing, in those moments when you know there’s a perfect word, even though you have not written it yet. You cast about for it, and over time, some obscure word will come to you—your mind knows it’s there. Often, it’s a word with such an extraordinary precision that you wonder how it survived. You think, This must have come down from early modern English or Anglo-Saxon—how did it come to birth? How did it survive? Who was it that needed this word first and coined it? It’s amazing. You wonder how many people have had any use for it over the last 300 years, but there it is.
Writing should always be exploratory. There shouldn’t be the assumption that you know ahead of time what you want to express. When you enter into the dance with language, you’ll begin to find that there’s something before, or behind, or more absolute than the thing that you thought you wanted to express. And as you work, other kinds of meaning emerge than what you might have expected. It’s like wrestling with the angel: On the one hand you feel the constraints of what can be said, but on the other hand you feel the infinite potential. There’s nothing more interesting than language and the problem of trying to bend it to your will, which you can never quite do. You can only find what it contains, which is always a surprise.