Good Neighbors
I have good neighbors. Lots of them. It has becoming increasingly clear to me how incredibly fortunate I am to have great people living in such close proximity. Not since 1988-9 when I spent an almost perfect ten months at university in England have I been living so close to so many people I can stand. All right, more than stand. Like. Love. Enjoy.
This only proves that the commune idea was right all along, that really, what would make life wonderful would be to collect say, 25 of the best people we know and their families and move them into nice houses all pretty close together with a big field in the middle where the children can play. We could eat at each other’s houses when the mood arose, have a garden, mind each other’s children. When someone baked he’d just triple the recipe. If someone knew how to wire lamps, that person would happily go wire any lamps that needed wiring. There would be company.
This fast, fierce world in which we live is essentially incompatible with trying to raise children. Raising children alone is demoralizing, isolating, confusing and maddening. Literally. It drives you crazy. It should be a group activity. It should take a village. Instead, we are all alone, all doing the same thing, but doing it alone, in our walls, in our cars, in our heads. Parents should be able to lurk in a group, all planting carrots or sanding bedposts while the children play nearby. Old people should be in the coveted seats near the fire, mending the blankets or stirring the stew while the slightly ill children sit close, listening to stories and having their foreheads felt with cool, wrinkled fingers. No one would panic about strange but clearly benign rashes on a child’s bottom because someone would have dealt with it, either in this generation or in one of the last three. Someone would know what to do.
We all crave community. The blogging world is no different — comment lust is really about being heard, being connected. We all want to believe that someone is listening to us, that we belong to a group who cares for our input. I believe in community and in creating it where and how we can, especially since physically proximate villages are scarce in the Western world. But I’d still like to live with my friends, as well as my family. Maybe in Wales. With some chickens.
I favour somewhere with a Mediterranean climate, and goats instead of chickens. But the principle is sound. Modern life is rubbish, and most profoundly so in the enforced isolation of modern individuals and/or nuclear families, the destruction of community by the imperatives of barely-regulated capital, the atomization and anonymity that has spread from the cities to engulf everything. If only I didn’t enjoy some of the fruits of technology and culture so much I would happily retreat into the woods, or that Mediterranean island. But we’re stuck with modernity – so let’s make the best of it by building community wherever and however we can. And if we can fit the goats in, so much the better.
I would like a small brown cow, please.
The thing is, all those people have different and frequently conflicting ideas of How Things Should Be Done, and we all hate compromise. I know I do.
I completely agree with you. The times I go crazy as a parent are the times I am most isolated. It’s so much easier to parent when you’re hanging out with other people. That’s why I’m promiscuously joining every mom’s group I can find in St. Louis.