When I was a Child I Read Books, Marilynne Robinson, 2012. This is book #17 in the Essay Project, a series of reading I am doing with CT. It marks a return to literary essays after an epistolary detour into the letters of Olive Sacks, and only a temporary return as we have plans to finish the rest of Sacks’ work…

My Thoughts on the Book — TBD

I must say, having just read the Preface and the first essay, I am beginning with a rather unfavorable impression. However, I will hope that her initial writing, which seems to me to quite polemical, will give way to more measured and approachable topics.

Nice Phrases

• Say we are a warm puff of breath in a very cold universe. By this reckoning we are either immeasurably insignificant or incalculably precious and interesting. p. 36
• It [ideology] is a straight-edge ruler in a fractal universe. p. 49.
• It was also Mrs. Bloomsburg who trudged us through Cicero’s vast sentences, clause de pending from clause, the whole cantilevered with subjunctives and weighted with a culminating irony. p. 87
• I remember kneeling by a creek that spilled and pooled among rocks and fallen trees with the unspeakably tender growth of small trees already sprouting from their backs… p. 88

Preface

In the preface, Robinson reflects on America and democracy, and offers a rather dispirited mediation on how things are going. She wrote this in 2012, and I can only imagine that she is far more disconsolate.

Robinson begins with a long quote from Whitman (circa 1870) about the greatness of America and Democracy, and about his worry that “savage, wolfish parties” acting from within will degrade the spirit and ideals of democracy. Robinson, writing in 2012, seems to find these concerns truer than ever, and comments on the decrease in tolerance for multiple viewpoints. “We have seen bad times and we will see more of them,” she laments. Well, that certainly seems apposite today.

Clearly, Whitman’s concerns were not realized, or are only being realized very, very slowly. Robinson admits the US has experienced a healthy and stable dynamicism, and attributes it to the long period of prosperity and advancement that is possible through domestic piece. She returns to Whitman, quoting his paen to Democracy, and suggests that his words highlight how far our vocabulary has drifted over the generations. She laments a shift to seeing capitalism as the dominant driver of our social history, and the loss of religious and spiritual language as a way of reflecting on our history and culture. She also sees capitalism, and its emphasis on economics and optimization as corroding everything it touches — this is a rare moment when I am in accord with her thinking.

If she had such a dismal view of the future in 2012, I can hardly imagine her views now. That is not to say that she is wrong, of course.

Essays

Freedom of Thought, p. 3

Overall, I’m not quite sure of the point of this essay. She takes a lot of shots at science, does battle with what seem to me straw men with regard to scientific thought. I end up unimpressed by her arguments, and feel she casts herself in, to me, a rather bad light. All that said, I’m not sure where we end up. She doesn’t seem too pleased with current religious discourse either. She ends with “Science can give us knowledge, but not wisdom. Neither can religion, until it puts aside nonsense and distraction and becomes itself again.

Focusing a bit on her comments about ‘science,’ and the sort of thought it fosters:

She begins this essay remarking that she has spent her years of writing and teaching trying to free herself of constraints. By this she appears to mean that she has tried to move beyond the ‘narrow’ ‘scientific’ conception of human beings and human life. She draws examples from her undergraduate education, but her examples — “moldy theories … memorized for the test and never thought of again;” and (faux) research with rats in the behaviorist paradigm – seem to me to cast aspersions on the institution where she was educated, and on her own commitment to learning, rather than establishing the case that college somehow imposes constraints on thinking. Similarly, her claim that the curriculum held up Freud’s thought (and others) for admiration simply because it was thought by Freud, seems jaw-droppingly simplistic: Freud is important because he had a vast influence on the thought of his time, contributed many concepts to an emerging discipline, and influenced (and antagonized) a vast network of intellectuals during his lifetime and later. One might argue that other thinkers had less impact for reasons that had nothing to do with quality of their thought, and that it is a disservice to breadth and diversity to ignore them, but that is not the argument she makes. Anyway, this left me with a poor impression of her character, and her qualities as an intellectual.

She is also rather careless with facts. The nth hand account (‘I have read that…’) she gives of the use of infant rats as reinforcements in an operant conditioning experiment seems dubious, and, indeed, although there is plenty of research on rat ‘infants’ (or “rat pups”) as they are called in the literature, I can find nothing remotely similar to what she describes. I think this is a story that someone invented, and I have the sense that the truth of it is not of importance to her — it is simply a usefully shocking image that plays into her rhetoric. Another very trivial example is that at one point she says she has read that the number of neurons in the human brain is greater than the number of stars in the milky way. That’s not correct — what she probably read is that the number of interconnections in the human brain is greater, etc.. This does not impact her argument, but does illustrate a certain carelessness and the absence of an external fact-checker.

There is more, but I’m sufficiently unenthralled by the essay that I don’t feel like pursuing it.

Imagination and Community, p. 19

I liked this essay much more than her previous one, and it largely eliminated the poor impression I had formed based on her “Freedom of Thought” essay — although I still do not like that essay.

She begins by writing about what she likes about books, and libraries of books. Here she strikes a chord with me. Then she goes on and introduces the apophatic — knowledge or reality than can not be expressed in words. She is very attracted to this notion, taking, I think, as sort of a holy mystery and reveling in it: “the unnamed is overwhelmingly present and real for me.” I’m not quite sure what to make of this. Certainly words, narrative, stories, are not the same as the reality of nature, but… so what? Why should they be? Language, like any representational system, is good at representing some things, and not at others. The representational mechanism of the calculus does a fine job of allowing us to deal with the infinite and the infinitesimal, where words — for example, in Xeno’s paradoxes — founder in a seemingly paradoxical fashion.

What I like most in this essay are her reflections on community, and the imaginative aspects the underlie it. She does not appear to be familiar with, or at least does not cite, Benedict Anderson’s seminal work on “Imagined Community.” While there is resonance with that, she also reflects on her relationship — as an author of fiction — with wholly the thoughts, feelings and actions of wholly imaginary characters.

I would say, for the moment, that community, at least community larger than the immediate family, consists very largely of imaginative love for people we do not know or whom we know very slightly. This thesis may be influenced by the fact that I have spent literal years of my life lovingly absorbed in the thoughts and perceptions of who knows it better than I?— people who do not exist. And, just as writers are engrossed in the making of them, readers are profoundly moved and also influenced by the nonexistent, that great clan whose numbers increase prodigiously with every publishing season. I think fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification.

—ibid., p 21

Austerity as Ideology, p. 35

While I can’t say I enjoyed reading this essay, it exhibits her strengths as a writer and thinker. As I read, the thought that kept recurring was ‘If she was this disturbed in 2012, how must she feel now?’ It seems to me that every concern she has articulated seems to have intensified tenfold. Yikes.

She is good a diagnosing and describing, but I see little in the way of prescription or hope. Austerity and fear have fused into a single driving ethos, and are the motive force behind the destruction of various public institutions that were designed to benefit a broad range of people. While she notes an alternative approach at the end of her essay, it seems more wistful than hopeful. Of course, there is no requirement that she solve problems or offer hope.

Much of what she said was familiar to me, but I found a couple of her explorations thought-provoking. One had to do with the cold war period, and how threatening the US and UK must have seemed to the Russians. And, following on from that, the ‘competition’ between the US and the Soviets in arts, culture and science. The cultural competition, she thinks, helped us; the military competition was disastrous for both.

… reading break ….

Open Thy Hand Wide: Moses and the Origins of American Liberalism, p. 59

When I Was a Child, p. 85

My favorite essay so far. It has to do with growing up in the west — Idaho — and some of the perspectives that that gave her. In particular she has some interesting remarks about being unattached to particular traditions, and about loneliness being, if not a good thing, at least something with positive connotations. She suggests that loneliness and unattachment, while they have become associated with dysfunction in the general culture, still have positive associations that can be seen in the aloof heros of westerns, and the protagonists of country-western songs.

She segues into a discussion of Housekeeping, her novel (seemingly assuming that of course her readers will be familiar with it). I found that a little irritating, but not without interest.

We have colonized a hostile planet, and we must stanch every opening where cold and dark might pour through and destroy the false climates we make, the tiny simulations of forgotten seasons beside the Euphrates, or in Eden. At a certain level housekeeping is a regime of small kindnesses, which, taken together, make the world salubrious, savory, and warm.

ibid. 93

and

I remember kneeling by a creek that spilled and pooled among rocks and fallen trees with the unspeakably tender growth of small trees already sprouting from their backs, and thinking, there is only one thing wrong here, which is my own presence, and that is the slightest imaginable intrusion feeling that my solitude, my loneliness, made me almost acceptable in so sacred a place.

– ibid. 88

The Fate of Ideas: Moses, p. 95

Wondrous Love, p. 125

The Human Spirit and the Good Society, p. 143

Who Was Oberlin: Cosmology, p. 183

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