the New Pantagruel

No Small World

by Ragan Sutterfield

y grandfather often tells a story from his boyhood in rural Arkansas of a school trip to the county seat. The trip was only about twenty miles by bus, but this was before the widespread use of cars, and twenty miles was quite a distance—much farther than many of his classmates had ever traveled. Laughing, my grandfather tells of one boy who was particularly excited by the trip. Upon reaching the town this boy stepped off the bus, threw his arms above his head, and exclaimed: “Who would have known the world was so big!”

This is a funny story because the boy in it seems so backward, like some red-neck in a comedy show, but it would be a mistake to miss the wisdom of his excitement. For this boy twenty miles had doubled his world of deep intimacy, of connection, of knowledge. This boy knew most of the people in his community, as my grandfather did; he knew all of the good hunting, fishing, and trapping places, even the exact places where coons had been treed or big fish caught. It was a world that was vast in its own way, with more than enough space and change for an entire life to be played out. A twenty mile trip had shown this boy only that there were places upon places where such lives could be lived, with other people who knew where the largest fish had been caught or the biggest buck killed. That a twenty mile trip could take one to another such vast area could begin the imagination moving on to the next twenty miles and the next—each place with its own particular vastness. Who would have known the world was so big!

Compare this story with a conversation I once had at a dinner party. I talked with a woman who couldn’t be more different from the boy of my grandfather’s story. She was an elite of the new global economy—with no home but the world. This woman was an art historian and her husband was in finance. The two of them had met on a trip to Los Angeles while she was living in London and he in Paris. They carried on their courtship traveling to one another’s cities and once married moved to Chicago, but planned to soon move to Beijing.

After talking for a while she got around to repeating one of the most tired of mantras of the global economy, “Well, it is a small world after all.” I would not deny that her world was small. She could just as well live in France as in England, the U.S. as in China. Her day to day life would change little from place to place. There are generally the same sorts of people in each city, doing the same sorts of business, with the same sorts of shopping, even the exact same restaurants. You can go to Starbucks in London, order a caramel macchiato, and forget that it isn’t in Chicago except for the coins one gets in change. But to imagine that this façade of consumption is somehow the reality of a place is to miss something fundamental.

Each place from rural Arkansas to urban London has immense variation, and that variation goes deep and has a history. Someone who knows a place knows what that London Starbucks was before it was a Starbucks and what it was before that. A quick urban trip leaves only the sense of passing landmarks. But to really see the difference of a place you must usually go to the edges—to the working class neighborhoods, and further, to the outlying rural places. To know a place takes time, requires community, and forces one to listen. For this woman, it would take only ten minutes to find out where the nearest shopping district was. She just had to consult a guide book or ask a passing person. For the boy on the bus it would have taken years to find out where the best deer woods were. It is not a question that can just be asked right a way in a rural place. It requires time spent, connections made, acceptance. It is the sort of knowledge that is given, not bought, and is more tacit than spoken.

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