# “The epic of the universe” by Marilynne Robinson

- Link: https://tollelege.net/2010/03/11/the-epic-of-the-universe-by-marilynne-robinson/
- Published: 2010-03-11T14:18:18-06:00
- Author: tollelege

“I have been thinking about existence lately. In fact, I have been so full of admiration
for existence that I have hardly been able to enjoy it properly. As I was walking
up to the church this morning, I passed that row of big oaks by the war memorial—
if you remember them—and I thought of another morning, fall a year or two ago, when
they were dropping their acorns thick as hail almost.

There was all sorts of thrashing in the leaves and there were acorns hitting the
pavement so hard they’d fly past my head. All this in the dark, of course. I remember
a slice of moon, no more than that. It was a very clear night, or morning, very 
still, and then there was such energy in the things transpiring among those trees,
like a storm, like travail.

I stood there a little out of range, and I thought, It is all still new to me. I
have lived my life on the prairie and a line of oak trees can still astonish me.

I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees
amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again.
I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier
for that. There is a human beauty in it.

And I can’t believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility,
we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great 
bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us.

In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will
be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don’t
imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids
me to try.”

–Marilynne Robinson,_ Gilead: A Novel_ (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004),
56-57.

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