서울에서 책 읽기 3: "BAE 07"에서

"The Best American Essays 2007"에는 시리즈 에디터 Robert Atwan 이

2006년에 "The New Yorker" 같은 잡지에 실린 에세이 등 한 500여편의

에세이에서 선정한 100여편에서 다시 에디터('07년 guest editor) David

Foster Wallace 가 가려뽑은 24편의 에세이가 실려 있다. 아래는 그중 두 편의

에세이로부터의 몇 구절이다.

Molly Peacock, "Passion Flowers in Winter" 에서

Imagine starting your life's work at the age of seventy-three, as Mrs. D did.... Mrs. Mary Delany, a student of Handel, a sometime dinner partner of jonathan Swift, and a devoted subject of mad King George invented the precursor of what we call collage.

What interests me is that a life's work is always largely unfinished, and it requires creativity till the day a person dies. But where are the models? Where the readily apparant models for all of us who still consider that we are inventing a life?

... just as in a sonnet, the end gives the lived life a shape. You can see it in time. You can take the silhouette of another's life and place it against your own.

Yet the house of my grandfather, who who was descended from Northern Irish people... charmed the landscape. It was set in an orchard. it was neat and trim as a cottage.

Marilynne Robinson, onward Christian Liberals" 에서

... the rise in this country of a culture of Christianity that does not encourage thought.

Since these folk claim to be defenders of embattled Christianity (under siege by liberalism, as they would have it), they might be struck by the passage in Matthew 25 in which Jesus says, identifying himself with the poorest, "I was hungry, and ye fed me not." .... It should surely be noted that he does not apply any standard of creed, of purity, or of orthodoxy in deciding whom to save and whom to damn. This seems to me a valuable insight into what jesus himself might consider fundamental.

"Sell all that you own and distribute the money to the poor" (Luke 18:22). How on earth his teaching is to be reconciled with social conservatism I cannot imagine, though the question seems seldom to be asked.

지금 보니, 로빈슨의 새 에세이집이 뉴욕타임즈 서평에 올라 있다:

Marilynne Robinson's Essays "What Are We Doing Here?"