For some time we seem to have been launched on a great campaign to deromanticize everything, even while we are eager to insist that more or less everything that matters is a romance, a tale we tell one another. Family is a narrative of love and comfort which corresponds to nothing in the world but which has formed behavior and expectation—fraudulently, many now argue. It is as if we no longer sat in chairs after we learned that furniture was only space and atoms. I suppose it is a new upsurge of that famous Western rationalism, old enemy of reasonableness, always so right at the time, always so shocking in retrospect.
Madilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam.
