Making the most of an imaginary community

Ursula K. Le Guin, Machiavelli and finding your community.

While visiting friends in Portland, Ore., this weekend, I picked up a copy of Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay collection “Words Are My Matter.” Le Guin writes of community:

Home isn’t where they have to let you in. It’s not a place at all. Home is imaginary.

Home, imagined, comes to be. It is real, realer than any other place, but you can’t get to it unless your people show you how to imagine it — whoever your people are. They may not be your relatives. They may never have spoken your language. They may have been dead for a thousand years. They may be nothing but words printed on paper, ghosts of voices, shadows of minds. But they can guide you home. They are your human community.

All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them.

Your “community,” your “people” — these are ideas that live in the head, not in empirical science. (See if you can find community under a microscope. How many electrons does it have?) The mind is amazing. It can conjure citizenship and fellow-feeling with billions of people. What other choice is there? The world is so vast that imagination is necessary for the feeling of belonging. The believer in nationalism cannot know or love another countryman except by through the shared idea — or shared delusion. So too with our towns, fandoms, la raza and the ummah, and so on. This is how Le Guin can argue, with force, that community is a creative act, a connective fantasy.

We must respect the hallucinogenic properties of communal feeling, which are overpowering. The desire for connection breathes life into objects, the way a child finds company in toys and gives them names, or how the lonesome love their AI chatbots. These psychic projections are not tricks of code or plastic. The impulses are ancient. Humans have divined messages from the wind and the falling star and have loved the invisible gods forever.

I have my own delusions. Like Le Guin, I’m a patriot in the republic of letters. We have no borders. It’s a community unbounded by nation, language, even death. Niccolò Machiavelli, trundling around in exile, described his daily companions in one of the most famous letters in all of literature¹:

When I leave the wood, I go to a spring, and from there to an aviary of mine. I have a book under my arm, Dante or Petrarch, or one of the minor poets like Tibullus, Ovid, and such. I read of their amorous passions and their loves; I remember my own and enjoy myself for a while in this thinking. Then I move on along the road to the inn; I speak with those passing by; I ask them news of their places; I learn various things; and I note the various tastes and different fancies of men. ...

When evening has come, I return to my house and go into my study. At the door I take off my clothes of the day, covered with mud and mire, and I put on my regal and courtly garments; and decently reclothed, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was born for. There I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their humanity reply to me. And for the space of four hours I feel no boredom, I forget every pain, I do not fear poverty, death does not frighten me. I deliver myself entirely to them.

I look at my shelves and see my community. There is a breath of life between each set of covers, released into the air when it’s time to read. I judge the books but it’s like they judge me too, sitting there lined up like a jury, taking in their evidence.

1. https://archive.org/stream/machiavellitovettori1513_201911/Machiavelli%20to%20Vettori%20%5B1513%5D_djvu.txt