Bob Rossney: November 2008 Archives

Cain killed Abel, and the blood cried out from the ground - a story so sad even God took notice of it.  Maybe it was not the sadness of the story, since worse things have happened every minute since that day, but its novelty that He found striking.  In the newness of the world God was a young man, and grew indignant over the slightest things.  In the newness of the world God had perhaps not Himself realized the ramifications of certain of His laws, for example, that shock will spend itself in waves; that our images will mimic every gesture, and that shattered they will multiply and mimic every gesture ten, a hundred, or a thousand times.  Cain, the image of God, gave the simple earth of the field a voice and a sorrow, and God Himself heard the voice, and grieved for the sorrow, so Cain was a creator, in the image of his Creator.  God troubled the waters where He saw His face, and Cain became his children and their children and theirs, through a thousand generations, and all of them transients, and wherever they went everyone remembered that there had been a second creation, that the earth ran with blood and sang with sorrow.  And let God purge this wicked sadness away with a flood, and let the waters recede to pools and ponds and ditches, and let every one of them mirror heaven.  Still, they taste a bit of blood and hair.  One cannot cup one's hand and drink from the rim of any lake without remembering that mothers have drowned in it, lifting their children toward the air, though they must have known as they did that soon enough the deluge would take all the children, too, even if their arms could have held them up.  Presumably only incapacity made infants and the very old seem relatively harmless.  Well, all that was purged away, and nothing is left of it after so many years but a certain pungency and savor in the water, and in the breath of creeks and lakes, which, however sad and wild, are clearly human.

- Marilynne Robinson, from her novel Housekeeping