When I Was a Child I Read Books: Essays

Every five years or so, Marilynne Robinson has produced a book of essays, notably Absence of Mind and The Death of Adam, with the latest arrival When I was a Child I Read Books: Essays. The best of Robinson shines in these latest essays: In them she lays out her vision of the American Dream, celebrating the strengths of the American way of life, marked by its liberality (individual freedom), sense of community, and generosity, each informed by a non-sectarian respect for the soul.Like Walt Whitman, she finds that America, with all of its flaws, is better in providing a liberal home for all citizens than alternatives past or present; that America has struggled its way to a much more full but still incomplete democracy, driven by respect for each citizen, which she describes as a non-sectarian religious imperative, arising perhaps paradoxically by the founder's insistence on the separation of church and state. She suggests that diversity in America's population has contributed more to its vibrancy and progress than to internal conflict or instability: "We are blessed with the impossibility of arriving at a definition of America that is either exhaustive or final not only because of our continuously changing and self-transforming population but also, as Whitman says, because we have never fully achieved democracy. This is a very reasonable light in which to consider a mingled heritage, full of lapses and errors and therefore often said to be hypocritical or failed, even by those who see themselves as its defenders. By Whitman's lights this process of discovery, with all its setbacks, is a splendid, metaphysically brilliant passage in human history. It is moved by the power of religious imperative because it honors and liberates the sacred human person."She is concerned that Americans maintain their optimism in democracy and some remove from partisanship, and quotes from Whitman's 1871 essay Democratic Vistas: "It is the fashion . . . to decry the whole formulation of the active politics of America, as beyond redemption, and to be carefully kept away from. See you that you do not fall into this error. America, it may be, is doing very well upon the whole, notwithstanding these antics of the parties and their leaders . . . These savage, wolfish parties alarm me. Owning no law but their own will, more and more combative, less and less tolerant of the idea of ensemble and of equal brotherhood, the perfect equality of the States, the ever-overarching American ideas, it behooves you to convey yourself implicitly to no party, nor submit blindly to their dictators, but steadily hold yourself judge and master over all of them."She is appalled by the current stingy stripping of social and community support in the name of a blind capitalism: "I know that there are numberless acts of generosity, moral as well as material, carried out among its people every hour of the day. But the language of public life has lost the character of generosity, and the largeness of spirit that has created and supported the best of our institutions and brought reform to the worst of them has been erased out of historical memory. On both sides the sole motive force in our past is now said to have been capitalism. On both sides capitalism is understood as grasping materialism that has somehow or other yielded the comforts and liberties of modern life. Capitalism thus understood is seen on one side as providential , so good in its effects that it reduces Scripture with its do-unto-others to shibboleth. The other side sees it as more or less corrupting and contemptible but beyond human powers to resist. . . . What if good institutions were in fact the product of good intentions? What if the cynicism that is supposed to be rigor and the acquisitiveness that is supposed to be realism are making us forget the origins of the greatness we lay claim to-- power and wealth as secondary consequences of the progress of freedom, or, as Whitman would prefer, Democracy?"Robinson suggests 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." She defends and celebrates community, obsensibly the writing and academic community but clearly extending it to society as a whole. Imagination flourishes ultimately in community, not only because it must be shared to have use or meaning, but because community elicits and shapes an individual's imagination in turn. Our thought lives are inseparable from our communities: "Language is profoundly communal, and in the mere fact of speaking, then writing , a wealth of language grows and thrives among us that has enabled thought and knowledge in a degree we could never calculate. As individuals and as a species, we are unthinkable without our communities." She closes her essay on Imagination and Community with this: "It is very much in the gift of the community to enrich individual lives, and it is in the gift of any individual to enlarge and enrich community. The great truth that is too often forgotten is that it is in the nature of people to do good to one another."The author's essays are written in polished and thoughtful phrases; she can mix similes, analogies, indirect labeling, sarcasm, and some ad hominem to form her arguments, and fold them into complex sentences that a German would surely admire, her self-described debt to Cicero notwithstanding. Robinson sees and describes the world as a novelist; she is an assured writer who weaves images and ideas into a narrative: what may seem secondary characteristics are for her necessary parts of a complex whole. She might ask patience of her dear readers: While her style can sometimes seem unnecessarily tedious, it can also be stimulating, forcing the reader at times to reread a sentence to capture its multiple ideas, often admirably tied together. I have found it impossible to read her lightly, to her credit.Reading some of Robinson's past essays produced in me a certain amount of frustration, not because I sometimes disagreed with her conclusions, but because the writing could come across as episodically ungenerous and uncareful: brilliant paragraphs followed jarringly by one more polemical or slippery or caustic. Yet hoping against hope, I chose to read these essays looking for the best of Robinson, and am thankful that I did. In these essays, hope transcends acknowledged disappointment; in them are revealed the author's heart, and it is a capacious heart, which seems to moderate her bitter mordancy in a wonderful way, blunting the sharp-knifed edge that often marred her previous essay collections without dulling her passion for those ideas that make America great: Liberality, generosity and community, within and without.(A more detailed version of this review can be found on the Oregon Scribbler.)

I have become a huge fan of Marilynne Robinson, especially her non-fiction essays, though her novels, Gilead and Home, were deeply moving even though I rarely read fiction. The present book of essays are food for the soul that may be sagging under the weight of the political idiocy, uncaring ideology, and religion that is devoid of any sense of mystery that is abroad in the land. The extent of commentary on the general content of these essays is so extensive in the reviews that have been written that it would be superfluous for me to add anything about the topics. I share just my personal sense of the impact of these essays.Robinson's prose is always dense and full of lengthy complex sentences. But oh, the elegance and the intellectual and emotional impact those words make as she builds her arguments on the various topics that have grabbed her attention. Throughout, she is imparting the importance of the religious imagination for the understanding of human nature and human behavior as it is being played out on the political stage of 2012 America. Always, there is the literary history that she has delved into that brilliantly illuminates your thinking and understanding of the human problems she is addressing. At the core is the Bible and the theology of Calvin from the protestant reformation. She makes you think, oh does she make you think. If that isn't your taste, you can take a pass on this book. Otherwise, be ready for much to get under your skin in a salvific way.

A passionate and thoughtful argument for the liberal arts and Congregationalist religion. Moving and accurate about their centrality in America’s best traditions

The preface tells us the driving angst behind these essays: the state of public discourse. Beginning with the words of Walt Whitman, "these savage, wolfish parties alarm me," and tracing the forlorn, fading visions of religious mystery that decreasingly inform our Democracy, Marilynne Robinson calls us back to a revival of sorts, a revival of the American Romantic vision, "a vision that is wholly religious though by no means sectarian, wholly realist in acknowledging the great truth of the centrality of human consciousness, wholly open in that it anticipates and welcomes the disruption of present values in the course of finding truer ones" (xiv).Wandering in and through her essays, you are on the edges of reverie, her thoughts merging into yours at times so cleverly that the medium of the book almost fades and an alluring intellect draws you to contemplate "the sense of the sacred, the beautiful, everything in any way lofty" (5). Like a sylph of the woods, the music of her words is indeed wonderful, especially in those passages where she contemplates the miracle of being, the ever-present "I," or eye of individual consciousness, the soul. And wrapped up in being are the other beings around us, a lavish, heterogeneous community, thinking and feeling around us, and God to whom we owe an endless debt for the wondrous beauty of existence. When she speaks--no sings--of the imagination, of writing, of the wonder of words and non-words (the apophatic, unspeakable reality), there is a singing that rises in you as well of the miraculous nature of life and its abundant energy and creativity.But it is a sylph of the groves of academe with whom we commune: the sharp edges of reality when they penetrate there snap us out of the daydream fast enough. Politics and its ugly discourse intrude on the reverie. Villains arise, i.e., the bete noires of modern liberalism (the Tea Party, framed as false American patriots and/or ignorant Christians), those to the right of Robinson's political position who naturally fail to see with the eyes of their intellect and soul, blind and bound. They serve as a dark backdrop, a stark contrast to a "community organizer" (Oberlin, no really, p.166) and others like the writer who would roll backwards, historically and metaphorically, "the dearth of humane imagination for the integrity and mystery of other lives" (45). Alas, the wondrous has yet again, even here, escaped us for the meanness of public discourse and the harshness of judgment, lofty and high-flown though it may be.And we, Calibans that we are, realize it is a song we have lingered to, a very beautiful one, as one from our childhood, one that can only be maintained in a secluded, protected spot, a sylvan grove, a writer's workshop, an ivory tower.

I bought this collection of essays as a birthday present for my daughter, since we'd both read and greatly enjoyed Robinson's novels "Gilead" and "Home". It's a collection of essays about America, Christianity, religion and science. Despite the title, there's not very much about being a child and reading books, apart from the observation that she preferred books that were "old and thick and hard" [p85], which tells you a lot about the sort of child she was, and the person she grew up to be (for example, on p113, she refers to the "always useful 1560 edition of the Geneva Bible").Themes that run through this admirable compendium include the loss of generosity in America, human nature and its contradictions, the role of faith and the creative impulse that bears fruit in literature (and, for those who believe, in the universe itself). This book was published in 2012, so misses any changes in the amount of generosity exhibited in American public (or at least political) life since then, but her remarks are still crucially relevant; she points out, for example, that the US "as a society is structured around any number of institutions that are not [...] capitalist. Suddenly anything public is 'socialism', therefore a deviancy, [and a corruption of] the public virtue" [p49]. Her closely-argued notions of generosity come from The Bible, in a lengthy essay entitled "Moses and the Origins of American Liberalism", where she defends Calvinism against modern views of it as an inspiration for capitalism. She asks the reader to remember that America was founded not on the premise that people are mainly motivated by greed, but as an experiment which tried to build a society on the principle of love and generosity.Elsewhere, she gives short shrift to scientists who argue against the existence of God, believing that there's no need to view religion and science as adversarial. There's a lot of stimulating ideas in this well-written book which, although I found it hard going in places, is a worthwhile and thought-provoking read.

This book consists of a series of essays and articles about many things - education, faith, literature and a plea for tolerance. Marilynne Robinson claims she has spent most of her life studying American history and literature, bemoans the fact that the public education system is being starved and abandoned and that resources are ebbing away from universities, libraries and schools. Although the author writes mainly about America, it is clear that we in Britain can share many of her concerns.There are many impassioned pieces in this book and much I could understand and empathise with, not least her claim that having so many books, and many unread, does not dampen her pleasure in acquiring more books! This is a work that really needs concentration, it is not a light read, but it discusses many important issues - the basis of commmunity, why readers are profoundly moved and influenced by nonexistent characters, human sympathy, identification, our affinity with books and why people crave and create fiction. There is much about the climate of generalised fear and anxiety, the current financial crisis, the origins of American Liberalism, the debunking and discrediting of traditions, such as the Old Testament and the trail of history and culture left and created by humans. Overall, this is an uplifting and emotional read, which I thoroughly enjoyed and gave me much to think about.

This is a great collection of essays and well worth buying. She discusses a wide variety of topics - the role of education in public life, the economic crisis, fashions in readings of the Old Testament - and yet the overall impression is not journalistic, because she asks such profound questions even about the most immediate crises facing her society. You really get a sense of a coherent and searching philosophy of life. Plus, as with her fiction, there is the sheer pleasure of reading beautifully constructed sentences - she is wonderful at producing turns of phrase that you instantly want to reread, just for the pleasure of hearing them again.When I first bought the book, I found that the Kindle edition was riddled with typos. However, I contacted the publishers and they very promptly fixed the problem and allowed me to download the new version which seems absolutely fine without any of the typos and errors noted in my earlier review. I'm very pleased to have the Kindle edition now, since this is an ideal book to dip into at random moments in the day.

It is a joy to read each one - beautifully written and very perceptive.

What a wonderful book of essays! Reading "Imagination and Austerity, I could not help myself thinking it should be required reading for people in public office. A thought provoking book which has that elusive grace I assiciate with her novels.