I’m rereading Gilead for a little bookclub with friends and really enjoying it. One of Robinson’s great talents lies in the centuries of thought — of “life” — that can hide behind the simplest of her lines.

By "life" I mean something like "energy" (as the scientists use the word) or "vitality," and also something very different. When people come to speak to me, whatever they say, I am struck by a kind of incandescence in them, the "I" whose predicate can be "love" or "fear" or "want " and whose object can be "someone" or "nothing" and it won't really matter, because the loveliness is just in that presence, shaped around "I" like a flame on a wick, emanating itself in grief and guilt and joy and whatever else.