Article

Thinking Again

What Do We Mean by Mind?

Marilynne Robinson

It will be a great day in the history of science if we sometime discover a damp shadow elsewhere in the universe where a fungus has sprouted. The mere fossil trace of life in its simplest form would be the crowning achievement of generations of brilliant and diligent labor. And here we are, a gaudy efflorescence of consciousness, staggeringly improbable in light of everything w (...)


 

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about the writer

Marilynne Robinson is the author of Gilead, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for fiction; Home, winner of the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction; Housekeeping, winner of the 1982 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for first fiction; and two nonfiction books. She teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in Iowa City.

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