Interesting planet

I went reading yesterday in the cemetery, and later beside a nearby lawn that rises behind the library. I was reading Gilead, and without clouds the wind felt just cool, not bitter, through the pines and over the green slopes. Marilynne Robinson writes often about God. "This is an interesting planet," she said as I sat there. "It deserves all the attention you can give to it."

Maybe it was half an hour later, maybe in the same moment, a heavy man ambled off the sidewalk and around the lawn. I hardly noticed him, except that we were both alone. He had glasses and thin hair; his arms swept upward, flinging bread into the sky and onto the grass. Aimless. A wave of crows descended from the trees and surrounded him like hungry ants. This continued past morning, him feeding, them swarming. He would disappear for a few minutes, then again crossing the field: more bread, more gestures.

I want to believe I was the only one noticing him--other benches, empty, the unused sidewalk--though I wasn't thinking about an interesting world. I didn't make the connection. By then in the novel, Robinson had announced that history could make a stone weep. She knows the world is very hard. I wasn't sad but still had a view of the cemetery, and it was perfectly natural to think of the graves.