Dillard, Robinson, and Thoreau

Previous fourteen posts in this series on Marilynne Robinson and Annie Dillard, super duper geniuses.

If you’ve taken a literature survey at an American college, it’s easy to think you know what Romanticism is. It’s a protest against dark satanic mills.

Why are the dark satanic mills bad? Here things get a little tricky. They might be bad because the people who work there are mistreated and underpaid, turning out inferior products for less money than they used to make, enriching some asshole who doesn’t care that his socks make the world worse than it used to be three times over: worse for the wearer, worse for the weaver (who has been ejected from common ancestral farmland by agents of that same asshole), worse for what we’re not yet calling “the environment.”

On the other hand,