Essays. The word is a reminder of student days with looming deadlines and frantic accumulation of words to meet the word count. But the essay is an important way of thinking. A good essay assignment provides a laboratory for thought, with limiting parameters which focus the subject and discourage irrelevance, diversions and imbalance. Books of essays therefore tend to be repositories of crisp, lucid, concentrated, considered writing. They may be organised under an overarching theme, or strung like pearls according to size and subject fit, or they are all written by the same person and their particular style, interests and writing goals make them self-selecting.
I like reading essays. Whether books of essays by one author, Journal articles pushing the boundaries of the discipline, Feschriften honouring the life work of distinguished scholars, or papers published post- conferences on whatever. The variety of writers in essay collections enriches perspectives, provides variety of approach, or specific examples of in-depth study of the detail in a restricted and specific small corner of what may be an enormous subject. On the other hand a book of essays by the same author gives access to the thought forms and intellectual wrestlings of one mind, either over the range of a subject or over a period of time as thought has gestated, germinated and grown.
Currently I'm reading the essays of Marilynne Robinson. If you haven't heard of her she is the author of the novels Gilead and Lila. If you haven't heard of them, treat yourself to storytelling that combines the sharp wisdom of a compassionate philosopher, the honest observation of someone who loves humanity and likes human beings, and who quite naturally tells her stories with God on or just over the horizons. Robinson is a theologian, a public intellectual, a precise and observant critic of contemporary Western culture, in all its unpredictable ebb and flow. Her standpoint is unabashedly Christian, and her criteria for what is good and worth defending are rooted in a moral philosophy informed by wide reading across the major humanities and sciences. She is not an easy read. She is a tough thinker who feels deeply, and an author who expects her readers to feel the effects of the workout in the muscles of the mind, not always used to such strenuous effort. But the effort is worth it.
If you want self-help positivity, look elsewhere. If thinking about what it means to be human, and to wrestle with the mystery and joy and terror of existence, is too much like hard work, stick with tweets, memes and feel-good literature. If the reality of a world drifting dangerously close to self-harm seems mere scaremongering, and you prefer the alternative and virtural realities churned out for our comfort and to keep our complacency levels viable, then Robinson's wisdom won't help you, even though one of her heroes diagnosed your condition decades ago: "humankind cannot stand too much reality." (T S Eliot).
But if you're tired of cheap consoling clichés, perplexed by the unravelling of local and global communities, open to analyses of our cultural shifts that pays serious attention to history, literature, religion and humane learning, then read Marilynne Robinson's essays. They are astringent in their criticism, both cleansing and stinging. She cares deeply and patiently for human goodness, and believes it is found in human communities, from households to villages, from cities to countries. She is unafraid of the conversation that must take place between science and religion, and she is a wonderful facilitator in that conversation. She knows that liberal democarcy is in trouble, and knows at least some of the reasons, and a few possible remedies. Read her, and ponder the wisdom which is built on foundation pillars plunged deep into the bedrock of a faith at home in the Bible, articulated in reasoned conversation, funded by humane learning, and which is tempered by reverence, awe and a simmering joy in the wonder of things viewed from the truth that God is.
Here are some points to ponder from her book When I was a Child I Read Books
"In my Bible Jesus does not say, I was hungry and you fed me, though not in such a way as to interfere with free market principles." (139)
"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."(33)
"Wisdom, which is almost always another name for humility, lies in accepting one's own inevitable share in human fallibility." (27)
"I think fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification." (21)
"At a certain level housekeeping is a regime of small kindnesses, which taken together make the world salubrious, savory and warm. I think of the acts of comfort offered and received within a household as precisely sacramental." (93)
"I think it is a universal sorrow that society, in every form in which it has ever existed, precludes and forecloses much that we find loveliest and most ingratiating in others and in ourselves. Rousseau said men are born free, yet everywhere they are in chains. Since the time of the Hebrew prophets it has been the role of the outsider to loosen these chains, or lengthen them, if only by bringing the rumor of a life lived otherwise." (92-3)
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