deciding not to decide

from gilead by marilynne robinson

"and i would think back on conversations i had had in a similar way, really. a great part of my work has been listening to people, in that particular intense privacy of confession, or at least unburdening, and it has been very interesting to me. not that i thought of these conversations as if they were a contest, i don't mean that. but as you might look at a game more abstractly -- where is the strength, what is the strategy? as if you had no interest in it except in seeing how well the two sides bring each other along, how much they can require of each other, how the life that is the real subject of it all is manifest in it. 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."

"i have always liked the phrase 'nursing a grudge,' because many people are tender of their resentments, as of the thing nearest their hearts."

"it came to my mind that i should consider what i would say to myself if i came to myself for counsel. in fact, i do that all the time, as any rational person does, but there is a tendency, in my thinking, for the opposed sides of a question to cancel each other more or less algebraically -- this is true, but on the other hand, so is that, so i discover a kind of equivalency of considerations that is interesting in itself but resolves nothing. if i put my thinking down on paper perhaps i can think more rigorously. where a resolution is necessary it must also be possible. not deciding is really one of the two choices that are available to me, so decision must be allowed its moment, too. that is, as behavior, not deciding to act would be identical with deciding not to act. if i were to put deciding not to act at one end of the continuum of possibility and deciding to act at the other end, the whole intervening space would be given over to not deciding, which would mean not acting. i believe this makes sense."