Lonesome

In her new essay collection, When I Was a Child I Read Books: Essays , Marilynne Robinson suggests that the difference between the Eastern and Western US is that “in the West ‘lonesome’ is a word with strongly positive connotations.’” Wandering the forests of Idaho in her childhood, she would kneel “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 [think], there is only one thing wrong here, which is my own presence, that that is the slightest imaginable intrusion.” She recalls “feeling that my solitude, my loneliness, made me almost acceptable in so sacred a place.” She remembers visits to her grandparents’ ranch in Sagle where she first “heard the word ‘lonesome’ spoken in tones that let me know the privilege attached to it, the kind of democratic privilege that comes with simple deserving.”

Robinson worries that the US has lost a great deal in losing this sense of loneliness that came with the frontier, this sense of loneliness that was the experiential source of Western individualism: “Tightly knit communities in which members look to one another for identity, and to establish meaning and value, are disabled and often dangerous, however polished their veneer. The opposition frequently made between individualism on the one hand and responsibility to society on the other is a false opposition as we all know. Those who look at things from a little distance can never be valued sufficiently . . . . Only lonesomeness allows one to experience this sort of radical singularity, one’s greatest dignity and privilege.”

She ties Western loneliness with the tradition of the prophets:

“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 to rumor of a life lived otherwise.”

At the same time, she affirms the beauty of human society, “especially in those attenuated forms so characteristic of the West – isolated towns and single houses which sometimes offer only the merest, barest amenities: light, warmth, supper, familiarity . . . . At a certain level housekeeping is a regime of small kindnesses, which, taken together, make the world salubrious, savory, and warm.”

In Robinson’s view, “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. This is bad news for the American psyche, a fearful and antidemocratic idea, which threatens to close down change.” America has a whole would benefit from a reassertion of the West, she says, because “the whole country must hear and be reanimated by dreams and passions it has too casually put aside and too readily forgotten.”

I have theological reservations about the individualism that Robinson advocates, but she makes a challenging case and, as always, her mesmerizing, Ciceronian prose has a persuasive power of its own.