Marilynne Robinson (born November 26, 1943), a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, draws from her centers of consciousness, including literature, Christianity, and civic-mindedness, to etch a meaningful elegy for the vulnerable state of community and democracy in America in her essay collection When I Was A Child I Read Books.

From her lifetime reading American literature and history (thus the title of the collection), Robinson builds the case for a community, the importance of language, and self-education on civic matters:

The old impulse that lay behind the dissemination of information and learning, the will to ensure that the public will be competent to make the weightiest decisions and to conform society to its best sense of the possible should be as powerful as it has ever been, and more powerful because of the fragility of the contemporary world. Instead, we have slack and under-financed journalism and the ebbing away of resources from our universities, libraries, and schools... This loyalty to democracy is the American value I fear we are gravely in danger of losing.

Published in 2012, When I Was a Child ... anchors itself in Walt Whitman's wisdom that "America, if eligible at all to downfall and ruin, is eligible within herself, not without." 

Close-mindedness, an "us vs. them" mentality, and adoration of the cult of rationality are to blame:

We have entered into a period of rationalist purgation. Rationalism and reason are antonyms, the first fixed and incurious, the second open and inductive. Rationalism is forever settled on one model of reality; reason tends toward an appraising interest in things as they come.

The sky through stars. London clouds as seen through a starry window of the U.S. Embassy, London. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

The connective tissue between learning, literature, and democracy occupies much of When I Was a Child. Still, there is a beautiful essay—"Imagination and Community"—that focuses on communion and connection and the positive benefits of isolation ("lonesomeness") as it exists in the West, mythical and realized.

Robinson argues Western culture balances connectedness and separateness (of the self-choosing, self-enforcing type) profoundly well, and they are often rooted in each other.

I am vehemently grateful that, by whatever means, I learned to assume that loneliness should be in part pleasure, sensitizing, and clarifying, and that is even a truer bond among people than any kind of proximity.

"The Wonder of Being Read To" by Marilyn Yee for The Examined Life. The bonds formed in childhood between literature and our minds, families, and peers form a foundation for our connection as adults.

In forming this sense of connection and community—real and imagined—we include the link to the past and the means for the future. We also ensure our ability to carry and create profound wisdom. (We owe it to society to ensure that wisdom is not corrupted.)

We live on a little island of the articulable, which we tend to mistake for reality itself. We can and do make small and tedious lives as we sail through the cosmos on our uncannily lovely planet, and this is surely remarkable. But we do so much else besides. For example, we make language. A language is a grand collaboration.

Robinson is prescient to the current political climate in America but not overwhelmed by details nor looking to lay blame. She draws on reason to reflect equally deeply on herself and others. Her essays have the same otherworldliness as her fiction, someone speaking as if through memory or a distant perspective. Maybe her long view, shaped through her guiding principles, forms this distance and her ability to deliver a measure of grace to all aspects of her writing.

Many writers and thinkers have long thought that a deeper connectedness to humanity occurs in solitude. From Emerson, who advised we should "look to the stars" should we feel lonely, to Rilke, who thought a "journey into self" was the ultimate way to connect.

For years, I have been interested in ancient literature and religion. If they are not one and the same, certainly neither is imaginable without the other. Indeed, literature and religion seem to have come into being together, if by literature I can be understood to include pre-literature, a narrative whose purpose is to put human life, causality, and meaning in relation, to make each of them in some degree intelligible in terms of the other two.

Additionally, many individuals like John Steinbeck sought that "bond of proximity" only to feel lost and disconnected when it didn't take.