Gossip
From the sophisticated, cosmopolitan city, one’s old home begins to look like a “little raw provincial world.” One begins to deplore “small town gossip” and “the suffocating proprieties of small town life” - forgetting that gossip occurs only among people who know one another and that propriety is a dead issue only among strangers.
Wendell Berry (1980)
Berry’s crusade for country
living
A bit more on Berry's crusade for rootedness in nature and place.
is very welcome, however, maybe it needs a little counterweight. He kindly offers us hooks in the words suffocating and gossip. Apt words that many feel acutely true of small town and country life. While, of course, most gossip is fun, harmless and at worst idle, within small communities it can also reveal prejudice and narrow-mindedness, telling of limited
horizons
On the balance of the familiar and the new.
and a rigidity of thought that is indeed suffocating. Suffocating not just to particular individuals, who then seek escape in the
cities,
Other dynamics at work in escape to (and from) cities.
but ultimately to the whole community’s ambitions and development. Berry’s own life, as urban academic returning to the country, illustrates how the return of the native need not end in tragedy. Rather such returnees, invigorated by the challenges to their assumptions wrought by contact with other communities, (which we all so vitally need) may offer fresh breath and alleviate the suffocation from which they rightly fled.
The Berry quote is from his collection of essays entitled What Are People For? on page 80 of the 2010 edition, published by Counterpoint, Berkeley.
The photograph was taken at the street market near Huổi Ke in the shadow of mount Phăng Xi Păng, west of Sa Pa, in northern Vietnam.
Above, hovering on blue introduces a link: click to go, move away to stay.
Saturday 2nd March 2024
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