..now that I am about to leave this world, I realize there is nothing more astonishing than a human face…It has something to do with incarnation. You feel obligation to a child when you have seen it and held it. Any human face is a claim on you, because you can’t help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it. But this is truest in the face of an infant. I consider that to be one kind of vision, as mystical as any.
Gilead, a Novel - Marilynne Robinson pp. 66
