This June, as a grandfather clock rang the quarter-hour in her modest Iowa City living room, the American novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson, a woman of 70 who speaks in sentences that accumulate into polished paragraphs, made a confession: â??I hate to say it, but I think a default posture of human beings is fear.â? Perched on the edge of a sofa, hands loosely clasped, Robinson leaned forward as if breaking bad news to a gentle heart. â??What it comes down to â?? and I think this has become prominent in our culture recently â?? is that fear is an excuse: â??I would like to have done something, but of course I couldnâ??t.â?? Fear is so opportunistic that people can call on it under the slightest provocations: â??He looked at me funny.â?? â?
â?? â??So I shot him,â?? â? I said.
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