The Village

Until I was eleven, I lived in a town of nine square blocks in eastern North Dakota. Our house faced the railroad track, alongside which the town was built. Behind it was the church, and two blocks further on was the school, a two-story brick building with a clock tower and a large playground surrounding it.

It was snowing on the day I am thinking of. My sisters and I walked to school, wearing boots, mittens, corduroy pants under our dresses and the warm woolen coats Mother had made with hoods for me and Solveig. The younger two, at seven and eight, wore hand-me-down red snow-suits. Scarves and kerchiefs were tied around our heads. A very ordinary day.

At school we unbundled ourselves in the thin, dark cloak closet at the end of each large school room, already awash in overshoes and coats on hooks. The kids who had come into town on buses from nearby farms took green-glass coke bottles from their lunch bags and put them outside on the big window ledges, to see if they would freeze. The snow was thicker and the wind was beginning to howl. Classes droned on, the teacher listening first to the fifth grade reading and then to us, the sixth grade. There were nine kids in my class, the same ones I had started school with. Michael and I vied to be head of the class. His father owned the hardware store in the little town. I always got A’s and so did he.

At lunch time, we filed down into the basement cafeteria to have a meal of hamburger goulash, hurrying to eat before the loud high school kids came down. If we had extra minutes after lunch, we played marbles on the cement floor around the huge, old coal-burning furnace that kept the school warm.

But after lunch the principal decided to close the school. “It’s a blizzard!” everyone was saying dramatically. We rushed to put on our boots and coats. Outside, there was Dad with tall, lanky Oscar James and his jeep. Dad had asked him to come and fetch us home! It must be a blizzard. Nothing like this had ever happened. We piled into the back of the jeep with its flimsy plastic windows and were home in a jiffy, the tires leaving no tracks in the whirling snow.

At home we had one of those gigantic furnaces too. Dad shoveled coal into it, it heated water which was piped into the radiators all over the house, and later Dad pulled out the red, rock-like clinkers. We were never cold. The snow drifts across sidewalks and against the house that day were mammoth, however. The next day, shoveling a path from our house to the church, someone made an actual tunnel. I remember walking out in the sunshine, amazed by the architecture of the sparkling snow, blue in the shadows. It was beautiful.

I suspect most of us would like to live in villages, if it were possible. Ours was centered around school and church, plus a few organizations such as the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the farmers’ co-op. Huge grain elevators stored the wheat next to the railroad tracks before it went to market. On the short winter Sunday afternoons, we drove out into the wide, flat country, looking at the black lace trees against the evening skies.

But of course it wasn’t possible to stay. Our family was itinerant, living in several villages before I left at 17, for college, for England, and then for the city. Even more than the need for work, I was driven by the desire to be where culture was being made. It may have also had to do with my own strange attractors which were working unseen and unaided.

The fear of being left behind, of being backward animated writers all over the world, says Amitav Ghosh of the years of modernity, in his book The Great Derangement [published 2016]. Modernism, the idea of progress, and time’s irrefutable arrow has driven culture for many years. The avant-garde hurtles forward, taking literature and art with it. Modern literary fiction inclines toward narratives depicting “individual moral adventure,” leaving out the collective, the non-human.

“But we have never been modern,” says the French philosopher Bruno Latour. If we, as people, allow art and culture to cut us off from the natural world, from the non-human, we will be much the poorer. If we do not look around ourselves, our cities and towns, to say nothing of the natural world in which they are located, will disappear.

Both men have something to say about climate change. Ghosh feels the problem can only be solved collectively. A quarter of the fossil fuel expenditure is currently done by military and security forces. This could be directed. Latour suggests careful attention to the life around you leads to change. We must change the insistent individualism and desire for economic growth which leads, in any case, to ever less satisfying consumption.

This year, after reading biographical material on Tolkien, I finally read The Lord of the Rings. Though it is a tale of adventure, the hearts of the hobbits are always in the Shire. The Shire was Tolkien’s representation of the village in which he lived, an Oxford in which he could get from his home to his teaching duties by bicycle and meet his friends at The Eagle and Child pub to talk about their writing. He and his friends fought modernist tendencies, looking back to the rich traditions of language which had come from the mix of early peoples converging on Britain.

For me, revitalizing the village, both in the country and in cities, rediscovering our neighbors, our environment of plants and whatever animals are left to us, is the work of the future. Paring down our needs and our judgments, while engaging in useful pursuits and exuberant arts, enables us to live together. Climate change may result in catastrophic storms and great migrations, and we desperately need to discipline ourselves into sustainable ways of living for everyone’s sake.

What makes the village attractive? I have never been drawn to communes with shared kitchens and facilities. But where families can each have their own bit of space to live as they like, and there are schools, libraries, sports clubs, gardens, churches and workplaces, there you have a village. When people walk past your door, when you greet them in the evening, when your eyes meet those of the person ringing up your grocery bill or pouring your coffee, there you have the beginnings of your village.

In the Heights, Lin Manuel Miranda’s musical movie which came out this summer, demonstrates how it works in cities. “Let me just listen to my block,” says one of the protagonists as she prepares herself to leave for the sake of her education. Another tells the story to several young children. “Say it,” he says, “so it doesn’t disappear. Washington Heights!”

We have never been modern. Our inner selves can have boundless lives and adventures, but they are rooted in the actual, physical, finite lives we lead. Why not make them real? Why not make them great?