Since you grew up in a small town and have always felt most at home in a big city -London...the Great Beast, Londonistan- country life and the rural 'areas' have never really appealed to you. To be honest, the countryside makes me feel slightly sick. Rolling hills, neatly parceled out picturesque fields, bovine docility, the parochialism and pettiness of peasants, the profound hierarchies of caste and gender sustained by the powerful. Rigidity, narrowness of outlook, 'irrationality' (dare one say it)...isn't that the reality? Perhaps. If Thibon is right-and he's probably as good a guide as anyone-then peasants and farmers are not your simple, conservative, traditional types but actually quite cunning. Are they also more in touch with nature, reality, the land and therefore more realistic, less prone to fantasies?
Of course, one of the most pervasive bits of fantasies that is dreamt up by city folks, the displaced, involves some sort of rural idyll, pastoral utopia. The deep desire for the unchanging, for fenced existence (to invert Larkin's phrase). The horror of living on the frontier, of lacking roots, a homeland.
And yet it is worth remembering that as rural life is drawing to a close (a majority of the world's population now lives in cities)we have, as a species, lived for at least eight tenths of our history without agriculture. A startling fact. Still, for all purposes, part of our mentality and habits have surely been formed in an agrarian setting.
Well, I don't want to say the obvious: that our current desire for the limitless is leading us to disaster: infinite wants and limited resources, so says the opening of any economics textbook. We want it all, and we want it now. And damn those who follow us to hell! The history of capitalism is itself the history of crossing frontiers, of colonising other 'spaces'. The 'space of flows', said someone. The idea of the home sounds woefully inadequate to us: it must take form as capital, be brought into the nexus of exchange: all that is solid melts into air.
The desire for endless happiness, for unlimited access. Restlessness, heroic or desperate as the case may be. Move on,get over it, and don't get fixated with any one identity, job, place or love. To talk of a vocation is really so old fashioned; one might as well talk about 'essences' or 'human nature'. Everything's interchangeable, and all is flux: liquid modernity.The pursuit of happiness is what it's about. City dwellers as the modern nomads.
Where are you from?
Nowhere in particular. Or, worse: I'm a citizen of the world!
And yet, maybe this is getting it all wrong, mixed up. As Hugh Brody writes in 'The Other Side of Eden', maybe it is the agriculturalists who have been the restless (and destructive) ones? Maybe-and this is the really troubling bit-city life is just an extension of, a natural progression from, a rural life. The 'unnatural growth of the natural (Arendt). Wasn't that there all along, from the very beginning? Didn't the settlers introduce violence, require the partitioning out of lands, enforceable by the law and, ultimately, by the threat of violence?
Anyway, all that brought back memories of Essex. God,how I hate Constable and Constable country.
(The pictures above are from my friend's village. Very peaceful and a quite special place. Intimately connected to one of the founders of one of the main Sufi orders in Pakistan (3rd picture). You can read more about the saint here).
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