My 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.
John Berger has compared the difference between the urban and the rural writing that, “The ideal urban surface is a brilliant one which reflects what is in front of it, and seems to deny that there is anything visible behind it… . The outside, the exterior, is celebrated by continuous visual reproduction (duplication) and justified by empiricism.” This urban surface is opposed to the rural or “peasant” reality of the visceral, the knowledge of what lies behind the surface. Berger says that for “the peasant the empirical is naive—What is visible is usually a sign for him of the state of the invisible.”
This difference between the urban “exterior” and the rural “visceral” reality can be seen everywhere. For example, for most urban people, and now unfortunately for most rural people as well, food is something that we have become abstracted from. We know in our heads that this meat was once a part of an animal. But for the most part we don’t know exactly which part, nor do we really care to know. Most urban customers are satisfied to find their meat plastic wrapped in the grocery store—they want no part of the reality behind it, or increasingly they want no part of meat at all.
On the other hand a traditional rural person, a peasant, knows both the outside and inside of the meat on their table. They know the life that the animal had before it reached their plate. As Berger has said elsewhere, “A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork. What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements in that sentence are connected by an and and not by a but.” The peasant knows what he is eating and is glad to have known it.
This difference between the small world and the large, the urban and rural, the exterior and visceral might be interesting for academics and intellectuals. But what is really the problem with a person not caring to know the sort of life an animal had before she eats its steak? What is the problem with living only in the world of the international city and not going to its borders to realize the deep differences between places? What is the problem with living in a small world rather than a large one?
We are talking about the problem of care. I know of no one who cares abstractly. We might try to act responsibly toward people that we do not know, but true care requires knowledge, experience, touch. If we do not really know a place then we will not care for it or know how to care for it. Knowledge and ignorance are not opposites, but grow together. When one has knowledge of a place one realizes how little one knows about it. The proper response to this is care—watching where one steps, taking time to act. When we see only the surface we think that we know the reality of a place, but our ignorance does not grow with our knowledge. This is where we miss the truth of things.
As Bonhoeffer once said, “No good at all can come from acting before the world and one’s self as though we knew the truth, when in reality we do not.” But to say that the world is small is to say that one knows it or can know it, and therefore can manage it. This is the “knowledge” of the expert—a sort of knowledge that does not grow with ignorance, but ignores it.
We are left then with a choice. Are we going to live in a small world or a large one? The choice is one of great consequence and harbors harsh penalties. Whatever we choose, there can be no doubt what our age has chosen. The modern, industrial age lives in the small world. It has sought to comprehend and subsume everything, to connect everything, and it has ignored what it cannot comprehend or connect. And what it has ignored it has often destroyed.
In the beginning of The Unsettling of America, Wendell Berry notes that “One of the peculiarities of the white race’s presence in America is how little intention has been applied to it.” The joke goes that this continent was “discovered by an Italian who was on his way to India.” That is to say that America was a land that was never really settled for itself—it was always a place on the way to something else. Gold, spices, trade routes—America was the first place to be formed by the new international economy that began, not with the WTO, but the Renaissance.
There were of course others who came before and after the conquistadors and explorers. There were people who came to stay put. But they have been the minority and often the victims of the more dominant trend toward movement. Almost as quickly as America became settled it began to move, first through westward expansion, then through the coming of the industrial revolution and the shift of the economy from the farm to the factory. This history we all know from high school.
What is more interesting is what has happened after all of this, when the industrial economy became well established and spread nearly everywhere, when moving to find work became less necessary. Just when the possibility to settle seemed open is exactly the time when Americans began to move more than ever. Here we begin to understand that economic explanations of American transience are not sufficient. Americans move not because they must, but because of something deep in their character.
Perhaps our best guide to this character is Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. So often taken to be a celebration of transience, I think On the Road is a painfully self conscious exploration of the worst parts of American restlessness. The novel is a thinly fictional account of a series of cross-country trips that Kerouac took with Neal Cassidy. The two of them are in a search for Cassidy’s homeless father who’s living on some street, somewhere. For both of them the trip is a search for some kind of home: for Cassidy the lost home of his father, for Kerouac the home he lost through his broken marriage.
But neither one of them can really do the things they need to do to settle. They are compelled to keep moving by a desire to see everything and do everything. As Kerouac says early in the book, “I shambled … after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time.” This is the American sort of exuberance that comes when we are told “You’re free to pursue happiness,” but not what happiness is. Somehow along the way we began to feel that it is desire rather than satisfaction that gives us happiness. We want, like Kerouac, to “burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles,” not to settle down by the hearth.
This replacement of desire for satisfaction has its roots in the philosophy of John Locke, so popular among the American founders. Locke believed that “everything that God gives us is almost worthless except for our freedom.” This means that creation is left to us by God as a sort of raw material to be made valuable through our own labor and choices. We are free to do with it what we will—God is not still present to give it meaning or value. As Peter Augustine Lawler points out, this leaves us “free to pursue happiness, but never actually to become happy.” At one point Kerouace describes a moment at a party in Colorado: “We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell, I guess—across the night, eastward over the Plains, where somewhere an old man with white hair was probably walking toward us with the Word, and would arrive at any minute and make us silent.” Kerouac recognized that for all of his burning and restlessness that he would not find what he was looking for on the road.
Propelled on from place to place by the Lockian restlessness of “happiness elsewhere,” Kerouac becomes lost. He describes the realization of this as he woke up in a hotel on his way to Denver:
I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was—I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap motel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.
This ghostly aspect is a symptom of the Gnostic nature of transience. To live as a part of a place is to live an incarnate, embodied life, but to live without place, driven by desire is to live without embodiment—you are never really present anywhere. This is lostness in its most basic sense; lostness is simply “being out of place.”
This lost condition is always whispering to us that life will be better elsewhere, that a new job will satisfy us more, that a new church will be more to our liking. So we move and move and move again. This is how we begin to miss the depths of the world that take time to see, that require patience and settledness. For centuries, the necessity of wresting food from the earth—developing an agri-culture—offered us a way out of this unsettledness. The agricultural way of life forces people to stay put, to wait and see what might appear from beneath the soil.
For Locke the world is like some bad birthday, full of gifts that we didn’t ask for and don’t need. To make it meaningful we have no choice but to exchange them and turn them into cash for something more to our liking. But for the agrarian tradition the world is a gift nothing short of miraculous. Creation is given by God and we ourselves are a part of the gift. It is not our role to give the world meaning and value—it already has these. Our part is to be what we were made for; our part is to flourish.
That the creation is a divine gift should give us hope, but it also means that we must live with caution. God is involved here, and with God and his things we must always be careful. Wendell Berry writes that the divine givenness of the world “places us in a position of extreme danger.” We are not just living among raw materials, we are living as a part of a created order Christ himself died to restore. The only response to this danger can be the response of Christ, Berry writes. We must have a “love for everything that exists, including our enemies.” But how do we do this with creation? To begin we must recognize the things of creation for what they are—unique creatures in unique places. As Berry writes, “to say that life is a miracle is to insist upon the uniqueness and the value of individual creatures; it is to set creatures free from generalizations about them.”
As I write this I look out my window and I see my flock of laying hens. Each of these is a chicken, and beyond that every one of them is of the Aracana breed of chickens. One can get little more specific than this. But even though they are the same species and breed, each of my hens is unique. They have different markings and personalities. They are all individuals. It may seem strange to speak this way of an animal, but anyone who has had a pet knows this. The problem is that in the industrial mind we do not treat things as unique. We raise chickens. We teach children. We grow soybeans. Little attention is paid to the uniqueness of each one of these. If a chicken cannot handle being confined with a thousand other chickens in a chicken house, we don’t change the system, we change the chicken by giving it antibiotics. If a child does not fit well with the industrial system of education we do not change the system, we prescribe Ritalin. The animal husband, the good farmer, the good teacher will have none of this. Because he acts from love he will respond to the unique creature in itself. As Berry relates, a horse trainer was once asked “How do you train horses?” to which he responded “Which one do you have in mind?”
To know the uniqueness of things one must pay attention to them. This means that we have to spend time doing it. In his carousing book The Supper of the Lamb, the Episcopal priest Robert Farrar Capon recommends that we spend an hour pealing an onion for lamb stew. The purpose in this is to pay attention to the onion—to realize what it is in itself. For many this may seem like something for someone with too much time on their hands, but for Capon it is nothing less than the practice of humanity’s real work. “Man’s real work is to look at the things of the world and to love them for what they are,” he writes, “That is, after all, what God does, and man was not made in God’s image for nothing. The fruits of his attention can be seen in all the arts, crafts, and sciences.” Who would have thought to catch a wild forest bird and domesticate it so that it would become the most common dinner meat? Who looked at a log, animal skins, and animal tendons long enough to make the first drum? The world is built on paying attention. The work of paying attention is the only sort of work that can never be outsourced or done by a machine because paying attention means paying attention in a specific place to specific things. As Berry writes, “No machine could perform work resembling that of Paul Cezanne or any good farmer, because the work of both presupposes a specifically human life’s devotion to the practice of an art and to love for a specific landscape.”
Such work with a specific landscape seems romantic in our age when few of us have had the experience of such work. The farmer and writer, Gene Logsdon offers his neighbor as one who has accomplished it. “Dave Haferd sees his farm with eyes that are 200 years old,” Logsdon writes, “He knows every foot of its 180 acres, on top and underneath. Walking across his land, he discourses endlessly and joyfully upon almost any rock, post, tree, clod, weed or building that his eye falls upon.” Dave Haferd knows his land by birth, tradition, and work. But he also knows it because he has paid attention while working and listened to what his elders told him about the place. Haferd tells Logsdon that they always keep red clover in rotation on the place, even if they don’t make hay from it and just plow it under. “‘Oh yes, it still pays if you only plow it under,’ he says, “This ground would not last without a regular plowdown of clover. And it’s the greatest help in weed control. We learned that long ago.’” The same might not go for another place, but Haferd has learned it for his. It is this specific knowledge that keeps a place going and growing food. If one does not pay such attention to the individual place one can damage it to infertility. Graveyards across the world hold the bones of immigrants who tried to impose a foreign agriculture on a foreign land without listening to the locals.
The central agrarian understanding of place is that we are to live “a given life in a given world.” This means, as Berry points out, that “our ability to change either our life or our place is limited.” Like the other creatures of the earth we must learn to adapt to our places in our habits and our technology. Our modern problem is that we have become too good at changing the place to fit to our desires. If we live in a hot place we don’t have to build breezeways to make our summers bearable, we only have to turn on the air conditioner. But unlike a breezeway where we can see all of the costs and benefits, the air conditioner comes with hidden costs. It entails the mining of coal in Pennsylvania or the disposal of nuclear waste in Utah; it entails mercury pollution in lakes and rivers, and other costs still unknown. We pretend that we have solved the problem of summer heat without adaptation, when we have only created hidden problems.
This became particularly clear to me one day when I went to an EPA hearing on air pollution from coal burning power plants. It was a hot, humid summer day with temperatures approaching 90 degrees F. Most of the people sitting in the room were in suits and the air conditioner was running full blast to make the room comfortable. One of the first people to testify was a man from a community group. He was neatly dressed, but stood out because he was wearing shorts, and a short sleeved shirt. When he got to the podium the first thing he said was, “I think it’s a little ironic that we are here discussing the damaging pollution of coal fired power plants when it is summer and everyone here is wearing dark, heavy suits so we have to run the air conditioner.” The man was right. Most of the people in the room were not paying attention to the given weather and were using damaging resources to adjust the world to themselves rather than themselves to the given world.
Wendell Berry once put a pond on a hillside of his farm where he hoped to make a pasture. He consulted the experts, he studied the books, but the pond did not hold. It broke and left a scare on his land. It was not a large pond and with time the land will heal itself. But as Berry writes, “there is damage—to my place, and to me. I have carried it out, before my own eyes and against my intention, a part of the modern tragedy.” We have all done this in some way; we have damaged our land because we have not paid attention to it. We have thought that we understood our place, but we have not let our knowledge grow with our ignorance. Our place has been damaged and so we too have been damaged.
Healing can come only through careful and creative work. This good work Berry writes, “finds the way between pride and despair—It preserves the given so that it remains a gift.” We cannot create the possibility of this healing; we only participate in it as creatures. To have this health is “to keep oneself fully alive in the Creation, to keep the Creation fully alive in oneself, to see the Creation anew, to welcome one’s part in it anew.” It is a gift we must be home to receive.
Copyright 2004-2005 :: The New Pantagruel 2.3.