Impressions to the contrary notwithstanding, let me say that I agree with just about everything that is said about the virtues of urban life in this very smart post. As someone who’s thinking very seriously – with my wife, of course! – about bringing a second child into a one-bedroom, one-bed apartment with only a sidewalk and a driveway to play in, I am happy to say that high-density living is awesome, and (short of landing that book deal where I chronicle my attempt to become a subsistence farmer – any takers?) I expect to be doing it for quite a while. I do think that rural (and maybe even suburban) living has a lot of real virtues too, though, and I wouldn’t seek to impose one or the other on anybody.
But what I was getting at in my complaint about Helen’s complaint about Wendell Berry’s complaints about cities is that even if you do think that cities are awesome, and perhaps even essentially awesomer than non-cities, that’s an incredibly flimsy reason to reject the value of Berry’s work tout court, since he does a whole lot more than gripe about urban life. He also describes the virtues of a certain (perhaps irrecoverable, though perhaps not) sort of rural life, for example, and tries to diagnose what has led to its decline, and tells a certain sort of (admittedly very controversial, and quite possibly dangerous) story about the history of agriculture and the nature of capitalist economics. He also has deeply important things to say about the perils of empire, the evils of war, and the proper understandings of sex, gender, race, and religion,* and is a first-rate (by my untutored lights, anyway) novelist and poet to boot. And so it seems to me that our presidential candidates should by all means pick up and read Jayber Crow or The Unsettling of America – in any case they’d do better with those books than with much of the rest of what’s out there.
* And Shakespeare, and education, and family, and literature, and science, and technology, and community, and patriotism, and …
Filed under: agriculture, urbanism
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