Dust Bowl Migrants

Every single one of us is a little civilization

In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable . . . . We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us. . . .

The times were dreadful, but it was just how it was, and we got very used to it. That was our civilization. The valley of the shadow. And it might as well be Ur of the Chaldees for all people know about it now.

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004, 197-198. Read the review at Slate.com

Gilead is exceedingly well-written and uplifting. The letters of a 76 -year-old father to his 7-year-old son, it contains a precise wistfulness that is rarely achieved by any author. I was struck, too, by how true to the father's Christian faith Robinson remained. There is very little, if any, anachronistic activism on the part of the author. While I enjoyed Wendell Berry's Jayber Crow, I could not say the same for that novel.

I am a sucker for nostalgia, not so much the Cracker Barrel variety as the type portrayed through John Ames, Robinson's narrator. "It was our civilization," he writes of the Great Depression, but it is forgotten now. To me this is why history is interesting to me -- it's the uncovering of unfamiliar civilizations, the puzzling over the logic behind the lives and attitudes and decisions of their citizens. I felt similarly when I was studying the Civil War letters of Lewis Q. Smith -- it was not just cold analysis, but an inexplicable emotional connection that I felt with my subjects.

Maybe it is simply that reading someone's letters or going through their personal effects (as in the case of Gilead or Mr. Smith) allows an intimacy with another's inner thoughts that we rarely experience in normal life. Because most people alter their delivery of information according to the intended audience.

Anyway, it's a fabulous book.