Initial Impressions: Imagination and Community (2012)

Presence is a great mystery, and presence in absence, which Jesus promised and has epitomized, is, at a human scale, a great reality for all of us in the course of ordinary life. I am persuaded for the moment that this is in fact the basis of community.

 

“Imagination and Community” is an essay by contemporary American novelist Marilynne Robinson published in 2012 among her collection of essays “When I was a child I read books”.

Robinson believes “the more generous the scale at which imagination is exerted, the healthier and more humane the community will be.” She insists it is imagination which spearheads a community, into loving people who are not personally acquainted with one another, on several “grounds”. It is with these conditions that she finds a problem with, as they cause boundaries to be drawn, limiting the role of imagination.

“…They insist that the imagination must stay within the boundaries they establish for it, that sympathy and identification are only allowable within certain limits. I am convinced that the broadest possible exercise of imagination is the thing most conducive to human health, individual and global.”

Differing with purists on the heterogenous nature of a community she says “Democracy, in its essence and genius, is imaginative love for and identification with a community with which, much of the time and in many ways, one may be in profound disagreement."

 “I love the writers of my thousand books. It pleases me to think how astonished old Homer, whoever he was, would be to find his epics on the shelf of such an unimaginable being as myself, in the middle of an unrumored continent. I love the large minority of the writers on my shelves who have struggled with words and thoughts and, by my lights, have lost the struggle. All together they are my community, the creators of the very idea of books, poetry, and extended narratives, and of the amazing human conversation that has taken place across millennia, through weal and woe, over the heads of interest and utility” 

Robinson proposes books as a model of community. We can perceive that she builds on the idea of community onto the historical sense framed by Eliot. 

“the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order." (Tradition and The Individual Talent)

Towards the end of the essay, she warns that the constant rebellion signalling the end of community might result us going back in time, to the uncouth age of tribalism. I found it interesting to place her views against the views of Rosseau, the most famous critic of the enlightenment movement. Rosseau in his essay “the origins of inequality” believes that man is better off not being in a community- which he thinks forces man to serve the states’ interests rather than one’s own, leading to inequality. He saw man as free and with self-esteem in his primitive state, when one had little need to cohabit with others whereas Robinson doesn’t want community to head back in time. I think it is interesting to see how writers of different eras (Rosseau indirectly influenced the French revolution) chose to view inequality vis-à-vis community.

Imagination & Community