MindSpinner

In Kent Haruf’s Plainsong, my favorite passage is the one in which Maggie Jones tells the two old McPherson brothers, batchelor farmers, that they need to take in and take care of a pregnant teenager who is no relation at all:

But that girl needs somebody and I’m ready to take desperate measures. She needs a home for these months. And you - she smiled at them - you old solitary bastards need somebody too. Somebody or something besides an old red cow to care about and worry over. It’s too lonesome out here. Well, look at you. You’re going to die some day without ever having had enough trouble in your life. Not of the right kind anyway. This is your chance.

In Plainsong, the McPherson brothers come to love Victoria Roubideaux. They opt for the right kind of trouble, and, frankly, they get it. Nonetheless, in Haruf’s novels, taking on the right kind of trouble is ultimately redemptive for all concerned.

It doesn’t matter what sort of love we can talk about, love for a child, love for a partner, love for a parent, love between friends, even love for a pet - love has ever meant taking on the right kind of trouble, letting it into our lives. Love has two faces - one is life’s deepest joy, the marrow of its meaning; the other is trouble, trouble in any shape or size we can imagine. Insofar as we love, we opt to risk suffering and loss, pain that plumbs us to depths that mirror precisely the heights to which love can reach. That’s the deal. We learn love by loving; we learn love by losing. A mother doesn’t think of this, holding her baby to her breast. Lovers do not think of this when they find infinity together in embrace.

But it’s still the right kind of trouble, and in the end, worth whatever comes. It is love that redeems us from the diminished selves we would otherwise be, and by love’s means we redeem each other. It is what we know of God (as opposed, in some cases, to what we think we know). It’s a risk brave souls will forever take.

Reading this again, I am impressed by how such notions can seem like platitudes - until they don’t.