Books bind us together, those who have read the same ones. But few of us have read the same ones. Those that do move in the same circles, or pods, or bubbles, and rarely do we find a kindred spirit with a different library. Its a shame because, as Danny Kaye once quipped, “Who wants a library full of books they’ve already read?”
Conversation with the like-minded can be happiness, but it can be emptiness, too.
The internet was once a boundless place where everything seemed possible. Now, it still kind of does, but the possibilities seem like traps. It takes an act of bravery, or desperation, or morbid curiosity, to read what the “other side” reads. Essays seem designed to titillate or aggravate. Sometimes both.
Blogs once held the promise of expanding the mind.
The blog boom of the early to mid-2000s
It petered out when social media gave everyone, and every nascent writer, a chance at viral, overnight fame.
Blogs inched forward into the 2010s, but then Medium came along and became the uber-blog, the one blog to rule them all. Famous blogs of the late 2010s were created and are free to read but, in reality, the audience is limited to very small communities, or what Seth Godin would call “the smallest viable market.”
We don’t read as much as we think we do. But we do read books.
Just rarely the same ones as others.
When I was a Child I Read Books, Too
The title of this piece is from an essay by Dr. Marilynne Robinson, a devout Christian and liberal, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the novel, Gilead (2004). Gilead is the story of an aging priest, newly married, slowly dying, who writes letters to his young son to read when he reaches adulthood. The aging priest writes so that his child may one day know his father and the lessons he learned.
Raised in Idaho, Marilynne Robinson’s first novel, Housekeeping (1980) was
the story of Ruth and her sister Lucille, who are cared for by their eccentric Aunt Sylvie after their mother commits suicide.
Housekeeping was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Dr. Robinson did not publish another book for over twenty years. That book was Gilead.
In those twenty-plus years, Dr. Robinson wrote nonfiction. She wrote Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State and Nuclear Pollution, about the British government dumping radioactive waste in the sea. (for an American variant of the dumping of toxic waste on our land and into our rivers, done by corporations, read Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation (2013), by Dan Fagin, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction). Mother Country was a finalist for the National Book Award.
When I Was a Child I Read Books is both the title of an essay and the title of her book of essays, published in 2012. Its about Christian faith and democracy, of building communities and feeling the pain of others.
Its about reading. And discovering.
“When I was a child I read books. My reading was not indiscriminate. I preferred books that were old and thick and hard. I made vocabulary lists.
Surprising as it may seem, I had friends, some of whom read more than I did…”
She writes about her life in Idaho, in the “West,” as she calls it. To me, an American living in Warsaw, the West is America. But, I digress.
To her, the West is a frontier. And a frontier is the realm of possibility.
“The American frontier was what it was because it expressed a considerable optimism about what people were and what they might become.”
The frontier is full of promise. It promises new things. Things you have not yet witnessed. The frontier will change you.
Part of the American frontier is a myth. But that myth had a purpose.
“I think it is fair to say that the West has lost its place in the national imagination because, by some sad evolution, the idea of human nature has become the opposite of what it was when the myth of the West began, and now people who are less shaped and constrained by society are assumed to be disabled and dangerous.”
Exposure to the new frontier makes one an outsider. The outsider has, forever, been the one who brings innovations. The outsider is the one we look to when society has imposed too much conformity, when new ideas, and not stale nostalgia, are what we need.
As astute an observer as any social scientist before or since, Dr. Robinson, PhD in English, alerts us to read widely.
We need diverse sources of knowledge. It will change us, together.
********
If you haven’t yet, start with Gilead, go back to Housekeeping, and move on to her essays about democracy, Christianity, community, and liberalism.
And her essays about reading. Dr. Robinson did lots of reading. She wants you to read, too.
Books, mainly.
Notes
“Who wants a library…” Attributed to a number of authors, but Danny Kaye said it best.
“is the story of Ruth” Sarah Fay, The Paris Review https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5863/the-art-of-fiction-no-198-marilynne-robinson
“When I was a child…” p. 85 (paperback edition)
“The American frontier…” pp. 90–91 (paperback edition)
“I think it is fair to say…” p. 93 (paperback edition)
The Sociology Place 