Aug 10, 2009
Sara Grant in Fanny Howe’s The Winter Sun
Sara Grant knew by age eight that most everybody else misunderstood God; she spent the rest of her life working to prove it. Fanny Howe’s The Winter Sun is at its most vibrant when reanimating Grant, a theologian and ashram matriarch whose insistence on tackling the innate contingency of experience makes her a touchstone for contemporary critical thought. “Magic,” she writes, “is an apt comparison to explain what happens to us as observers of the cosmic display”: we “attribute to all mundane entities, including ourselves, an independence and absoluteness which is truly illusory”—but necessary to live as anything other than a walking corpse. “Sara Grant died a year after I met her,” Howe says, “and now I have her books and some articles she wrote.” Get those. Here’s one.