From before most of us can remember we are soaked and steeped in the distinction between the town and the country. And as far back as Aesop we have been told that the ways of the city are not the ways of the country, and that, in fact, there is something about the country that is more grounded and authentic.
When Aesop’s Town Mouse visits the Country Mouse’s home, he finds the lifestyle too quiet and the cuisine too plain. He convinces the Country Mouse to return with him to the city, where there are “sweetmeats and jellies, pastries, delicious cheeses, indeed, the most tempting foods that a Mouse can imagine.” The Country Mouse is at first dazzled; the city offers luxuries unattainable in the country. But as soon as he has availed himself of these delights he is confronted with the servants, the dog, and, worst of all, the cat.
“You may have luxuries and dainties that I have not,” says the Country Mouse as he picks up his bag and umbrella, “but I prefer my plain food and simple life in the country with the peace and security that go with it.” And off he scampers.
I think I understand the Town Mouse’s impatience with the country. Two years after we were married, my pregnant wife and I moved from the suburbs of southern California to the rustic environs of small-town Kentucky. When we had first visited we’d been charmed by the old-fashioned main street with the bandstand in the park in front of the courthouse, and with the classic beauty of the little college in town—not to mention the lush green of the fields and the horse farms that seemed to go on forever. But it wasn’t long after we moved that the things this new land did not have began to loom large: There was little in the way of restaurants, fewer choices at the grocery store, and if you wanted to shop for clothes you had to drive an hour to do it. Everything closed at 5:00 p.m. On Sunday nothing was open and you were on your own.
We traveled back to California frequently with our two, three, and then four children. And, for a time, we thought we might move back to “civilization.” We missed the luxuries and dainties that we had not.
But the years began to work on our way of looking at things. The trips back to California became less frequent and less gratifying. The polluted air, the crowded roads, the endless asphalt—I don’t remember noticing them much when I grew up there, but on our visits they sometimes seemed the chief features of the landscape. Where were the cows? Where were the corn fields? Where were the patches of woods and the occasional deer crossing the road? Why did no one wave to you when you drove by?
Our three boys had by then spent a good part of their childhood tromping through the creek that ran through our backyard (or fishing in it), and our daughter had already taken to horseback riding (which eventually became her profession). We left California as unwitting town mice, but every successive trip back contributed to our transformation into country mice. Convenience became less of a factor; the genuine, close-knit community in our little town seemed a fair trade-off. There was something about the country that seemed more solid, satisfying, and safe—and there was something about the city that was artificial, anxious, and threatening.
This was not only our judgment but, as I later discovered, was the judgment of time and civilization. Literature, too, joins its testimony to these values. Aesop’s story of The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse is echoed by innumerable others in the case for the country. Children’s literature in particular is full of it. It is hard to imagine Laura falling asleep to the sweet strains of Pa’s fiddle in Midtown Manhattan. Wilbur was “some pig,” but would not have been so “terrific” in a place other than the rural barn in which he lived. And good luck finding blueberries for Sal in the cement jungles where many of us spend our days.
In fact, it is striking when you consider how few children’s stories take place in a city. The lessons we are admonished to learn (or are, more frequently, taught implicitly) are country lessons. When Almanzo’s father in Farmer Boy is showing him how to plant a wheat field, Father tells the story of a “lazy, worthless boy” who was sent to sow a field but who instead poured the seeds in a mound on the ground and went swimming, thinking no one would ever know. “But the seeds knew, and the earth knew,” and in time, when the seeds finally grew, they would tell of his wickedness when even the boy had forgotten it.
It is hard to imagine what urban analogy could be employed to similar effect. There is something about the fields and forests that allow the moral imagination to run free, and something too particular and too synthetic about the things of the city to allow what happens there to be universalized. What F. Scott Fitzgerald ironically called the “urban distaste for the concrete” seems to militate against the poetic. For some reason we seem to know ourselves better when we are closer to the soil—that from which, according to the Book of Genesis, we are made.
Our modern lives are spent more and more in the company of man-made things. We build our houses in man-made subdivisions and eat our increasingly man-made food, enabling us to lead our man-made lives and think our man-made thoughts. The country life is a life closer to the things that God made.
There is a distinction made in the old material logic of the medievals between man-made artifacts, whose pattern and purpose are imposed on them by man from without, and natural objects, whose pattern and purpose inform them from within. The wood of a tree has its formal and final causes buried within its very being, whereas, say, a bed has its pattern and purpose imposed on it from the outside by man. This is why, said Aristotle, if you were to bury a wooden bed in the ground and it sprouted, it would sprout a tree and not a bed.
In the old classical conception of the cosmos, natural things not only seem more real but really are more real. When we surround ourselves with unnatural things we should not be surprised when we find that we have been distanced from our natural selves.
The nihilist adult stories that make up so much of modern literature are set almost exclusively in the city. The modern tales of alienation and despair—Gogol’s Overcoat, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Sartre’s Nausea, Camus’ The Stranger—all take place in an urban setting, far away from the Hundred Acre Wood.
In Johanna Spyri’s Heidi on the other hand, little Heidi thrives when she is sent to live with her grandfather in the mountains. She gets used to going out first thing in the morning “to see whether the sky was blue and the sun shining, and to say good morning to the trees and flowers,” and is sorely unhappy when she is taken by her aunt to the city to be a companion to a frail young lady named Clara. Heidi’s very health deteriorates. She is “like a wild bird in a cage, seeking a way through the bars to freedom.” Clara’s doctor recommends returning Heidi to her mountain home, where she once again sleeps “soundly all night long, satisfied through and through.” Later, after visiting Heidi and her grandfather, the same doctor ends up recommending that Clara, too, be taken to Heidi’s mountains to improve her health.
There are children’s stories set in small towns, but seldom big ones. Small towns are towns in which humans not only live, but, being human-sized towns, they are towns into which they can comfortably fit. Margaret Wise Brown’s Mike Mulligan, Eleanor Estes’ “middle Moffat,” Robert McCloskey’s Homer Price—all live in the kind of small, rural towns that still dot the American landscape.
There are exceptions to this thesis of course, even amongst children’s books. Curious George, Mary Poppins, Peter Pan, and Trumpet of the Swan are all set in the city, although even in these the country is often a retreat, a moral refuge and a place of spiritual relief. And in many cities there are still communities in which you know the butcher at the market and the waitress at the local coffee shop, and where you are on a first-name basis with your doctor, your mechanic, and the barber who cut your hair when you were a kid.
One can find a little bit of the country even in the city, and there are even good things the city has that the country doesn’t. But when Heidi’s grandfather is asked what will become of Heidi if she never goes to school, he responds, “She’ll grow up with the goats and the birds. They won’t teach her any bad ideas and she’ll be very happy.” Most of us wouldn’t go that far. Still, some of us are sympathetic to the judgment of Beatrix Potter, who, after telling of Timmy Willie, the country mouse in The Tale of Johnny Town-Mouse, remarks, “One place suits one person, another place suits another person. For my part, I prefer to live in the country, like Timmy Willie.”